


Hope

by AlterEgon



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom - Susan Kay
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, F/M, Original Character(s), Trust
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-23 23:09:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 33
Words: 43,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/pseuds/AlterEgon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Could there have been a happy ending for Erik pre-Phantom of the Opera? Could the right kind of person have lured him off of the path that he had set out on?<br/>In an alternate timeline, a violent encounter during his wanderings of Europe after his return from Persia leads to an meeting that develops in ways that Erik would have least expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hate

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing and no one you recognise is mine.

  
Illustration by Rebekah

He had expected the attack to come sometime soon. He had stayed in one place for long enough to be noticed, and people usually did not take kindly to his presence. That he knew and had been prepared for.

He had not been prepared for there being so many of them.

He could have taken two of them, probably even three. Maybe not easily, but he would not have ended up pinned to the ground, a knee planted firmly on his chest.

His knife had flown into his hand the moment he had perceived the movement out of the corner of his eye, ready to defend himself by force and to take the life of his attacker if necessary. He was still allowed to kill in self-defense after all. The lasso was unsuitable for defense when he was outnumbered, and there was rarely only **one** looking for him in the dark corners close to his home when that time had come once again.

Sidestepping the blow that came, he lashed out with the weapon. The blade hardly scored the man's arm and before he could draw back his arm to keep the knife in a ready position that would allow him to strike any way that might have been necessary, a boot shot out of the darkness and connected firmly with his flesh just below the wrist.

The muscles in his mistreated arm spasmed from the impact,  but he managed to hold on to his blade. He kicked out and the heel of his boot connected with something – someone – who groaned. Hands grabbed him from behind, wrenching him around and against the side of a building. The hand wielding his knife was slammed into the corner, not out of its own accord but because someone was throwing more weight against it than he could reasonably counter.

Panic – a rare feeling – filled him for a moment and he used it, letting it flood him and bring in the desperate strength to throw off the attackers. The knife clattered to the ground, to be swept up by an attacker in the same fluid motion that planted his other fist into his stomach, hard.

His elbow found a target and a crunching sound followed by a muffled scream suggested he had just broken someone's nose.

The grip of the hands on him loosened for a moment, and he used the moment to try and turn to get his back against the wall while at the same time reaching for another blade that he had hidden on his person.

A shove from behind ended that attempt. Had he had a nose of his own, it would probably have been flattened by his impact against the building. He felt the rough stone of the wall even through the cloth mask he wore, tearing at fabric and skin below.

There was no pain. There was too much morphine in his system still to let him feel any of that.

Someone tried to kick out his feet from under him. More hands pulled on him, wrestling him down into the dirt.

A boot to the ribs, and this time the crack came from his own bone. Another one planted heavily on his already-injured arm. He twisted, but every grip he shook loose was replaced almost immediately. Punches rained down on him, interspersed with kicks. His head was pressed into the mud of the alley, filling his mouth with it and choking him. Someone got hold of a handful of his hair and wrenched back his head.

Air became less of a problem that way, but it was impossible to put up a workable defense in that posture. He let himself go limp, hoping to startle a reaction out of his captors that he could use to his advantage.

They were either experienced enough to not fall for it, or too cruel to care. He was dragged around onto his back.

Reaching out blindly, hoping to at least grab hold of a stone he could use or throw, didn't get him far. A boot stomped down on his fingers, pinning them to the ground, his arm outstretched in a way that made it hard to bring up the strength he would have needed to free his hand. Another one was kneeling on his other arm, a third got comfortable on his chest, knee digging into bruised ribs, luckily not in a position where it would cause the cracked one from earlier to do damage to his insides.

He saw the shadows of two more above him. So there were five of them. At least he didn't need to beat himself up mentally over losing a fight against five.

A glint in the hand of the one kneeling on him drew his eyes. He recognized the knife before the tip bit into his skin – it was his own.

The man didn't stab or cut to kill. He merely entertained himself drawing a thin, bloody line across the exposed part of his chest, where his shirt had been torn in the struggle. He stared hard, trying to make out as much of their faces as he could. If they left him alive, he would hunt them down later, one by one, and teach them a lesson. Not even his so-called conscience would be able to fault him for that. Or maybe he wouldn't even have to kill them. There were plenty of other options.

A hand shot down and grabbed at the cloth of his mask.

He braced himself for the moment at which his face was going to be revealed. Their shock at the sight was probably his best chance at getting away before they did more harm to his body.

The horror on his captors' faces was obvious when they saw. He even managed to wrench free his arm, but the other one was sitting on him too firmly to be dislodged.

He tossed up the knife, catching it upside-down, ready to stab instead of cut now. He had apparently decided that this was going to be the end of the life of the monster he had caught himself.

Too bad his head wouldn' t make for a good trophy in a sitting room. Such a waste, to die like this…

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	2. Loss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing you recognise is mine. The lady, however, is.

  
Illustration by Rebekah

Hoofbeats coming rapidly closer froze the downwards motion. As the sound drew nearer, the five abandoned their plans of finishing what they had started and bolted.

Breathing heavily, he lay in the street for another moment, - and apparently long enough for the rider to approach. He wasn't entirely sure where the time had gone. One moment he had been readying himself for getting up and out of the way, the next another face was looming over him, eyes scanning his body up and down.

He turned his face away – ridiculous, since he had obviously already been seen. Or not, since there had been no shock in the person's expression.

"Leave…," he started. His voice sounded choked and bubbly. He turned his head to the side and spat out dirt and blood. It appeared that he had bitten his tongue at some point during the struggle.  "Leave me be."

"I don't think so." A woman's voice, slightly accented but calm and composed. Was she blind or what? Hadn't she seen what kind of a creature she had in front of her?

"I'm fine," he claimed. He wanted to sit up, but now she was leaning over him in a way that prevented him from doing so unless he wanted to stick his face right into hers, and that he most certainly did not wish to do. Come to think of it, though, the blood may have obscured his features enough to make his disfigurement less obvious in combination with the bad lighting.

She pointed to the cut in his chest. "That should be stitched up," she observed. "It's not that bad now, but that doesn't mean it won't _get_ bad."

His lips twitched involuntarily. "I'll do that," he said. "When I'm home."

The woman cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows. "You have a background in medicine?" she asked.

He nodded. "Plenty enough to take care of my own wounds," he announced.

"Very well." She rocked back away from him to give him space. "Then I suggest you have a good look at your hands."

Automatically, he followed that suggestion.

A groan escaped him as he did. Not because the pain finally caught up with him – it didn't – but because it didn't take much medical knowledge to realize those boots had left several fingers broken. As his loose sleeves slid back to his elbows, the right one revealed a quickly developing bruise and swelling that suggested more damage above his wrist. He remembered that first kick and his arm being slammed against the corner of the building right afterwards.

Knowing where the injury came from wasn't going to help him any.

"I don't think you'll be putting sutures into yourself or splinting your own bones with those hands," she pointed out the obvious.

He glowered at her but didn't reply. There was no use in making a fool of himself by denying it. He bit the inside of his mouth to quell a feeling of panic. Next to his voice, the skill of his hands was the only thing of value that he had about himself. Should he ever run out of money from Persia, he would need that skill.

She had said something to him, he realized, and he had missed it. He stared at her blankly, realized he had slipped up again by exposing his face to her entirely and decided that it was too late anyway. Whatever she was going to do, he wasn't in a position to prevent it.

"I said, if you're planning on using them again, you better let me take care of that."

How much dirt _did_ he have on his face? He laid back his head for a moment and closed his eyes, thinking. What choice did he have?

None, to be honest. He didn't expect her to actually know what she was talking about. Then again, she could hardly make things worse than they would become if he didn't get anyone to do something about those injuries, and he could hardly walk into a physician's office and demand his services. He was pretty sure he knew where that would end him up in.

"Fine," he eventually said and started to struggle to his feet, trying not to bounce his hands and do more damage.

She was still sitting by his side, waiting out his answer. Then she rose with him, grabbing his elbow and steadying him as he shakily straightened up. He almost wished the numbing effect of his drugs had dissipated already. He could have needed the pain  to warn him if he was risking doing more damage to himself.

"My place," he said, indicating the direction with a motion of his head.

With a shrug, she walked behind him, adjusting to his currently slow speed.

He was determined not to lean on her or otherwise use her help for walking, and she did not offer. She merely stayed by his side, obviously ready to reach out if needed, but without actually touching. Maybe she had seen more than it seemed after all and merely exhibited unusual self-control. Her horse came walking behind them, not needing to be led by the rein. He rather liked that.

It wasn't far to his place, but what he saw as they rounded that corner tore another anguished moan from him.

They had apparently gotten to his home before they had gotten to him. The door had been kicked in, and what he could see through it was a shambles.

His head started swimming, and he dropped onto the steps in front of the building to wait out the dizziness, at the same time trying to regain his composure.

"My place," she said determinedly, beckoning over the animal. "Get on up. It's not far, but farther than I'm willing to walk with you in that condition. I can't lift you up if you faint."

He was about to protest. Just in time, he realized that if he did faint, he was going to fall over onto his already-injured hands…. He did not need any more damage there.

From the stairs, he actually managed to mount the animal with little help.

"Ready?" she asked as he settled in the saddle. It was shaped oddly, feeling strangely soft and yet more stable than any he had known before. His legs were too long for the stirrups, but the day he couldn't keep his balance on a horse without was going to be the day he died. He nodded and she started walking without bothering to reach for the reins.

Again, the horse followed her.


	3. Surprise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing and no one you recognise is mine.
> 
> Nadia, however, is.

The building she took him to was grand. It was a little way outside of town, set alone behind walls  that shielded it from view. He had passed it before, of course, but never spared an idle thought for who might be living there.

Oil lamps were burning in front of it. The flickering light revealed an architecture that he would have loved to study in more detail on another day.

She stopped and so did the horse. He slid off the horse's back, landing a bit more jarringly than he had intended to, but stably enough not to trip.

Once again he found her standing ready to intervene if necessary, but keeping from doing so as long as he managed on his own.

"Why don't you sit for a second?" she suggested, motioning towards the stairs in front of the large door. "I'll just take off his bridle and saddle so he can rest properly."

He said nothing but complied, watching her lead the horse towards a side building.

In the light of the flames, his hands looked worse than they had before – or maybe it was just that they were more discolored and swollen now than they had been.

She didn't take long to return. "Let's go inside," she said as she stepped past him and unlocked the door.

"What's your husband going to say about you bringing in a stranger like me?" he asked, unable and unwilling to keep a scornful edge from his voice.

She looked back at him over her shoulder. "What makes you think any kind of man would consider marrying a woman who walks about in a man's clothes, plying a man's trade?" Pushing the heavy door wide open, she gestured. "After you."

It was getting harder to get back on his feet every time he sat down. He needed to get an overview of the full scope of his injuries quickly. He still had no idea of whether this woman knew what she was doing, and he hated not seeing any option other than risking it.

He stepped into a parlor illuminated not by oil or gas lamps, but by round glass balls that gave off a steady light. Each of them seemed less bright than a flame would have been, but together they kept the room well-lit.

The door fell shut and he turned to see his hostess latch and bar it behind her. "I don't need any unbidden visitors while I'm working," she pointed out as she crossed the room and waited by an open door that led to a hallway. "Come. You'll have plenty of time to study the arc lamps later. Let's get you patched up first."

Oh, he had heard of the invention of arc lamps, operated by electricity, which was still a fairly new, but certainly quite fascinating thing. He hadn't expected to see them used so casually in someone's home, though.

He followed her past a number of doors that all had the same undecorated look and into a plain room containing a desk, two chairs, a number of cabinets and something that appeared to be a cot that she indicated for him to sit on. This room, too, was lit with the arc lamps. These were larger than those in the parlor, and since the room was smaller, they seemed overly bright.

As he obeyed, she pulled the bell rope by the door, sticking her head outside to talk to someone who had probably just come out of one of those side doors.

"Sorry to disturb you so late at night, Maria," he heard her say in an Italian that had just acquired a more casual inflection than when she had talked to him. "But I need you to prepare a guest room. I brought in a patient who will be staying the night."

Would he? He hadn't planned on that. Why would she want him to do that anyway? He didn't hear the response, but since his hostess returned inside the room and shut the door, he assume the reply had been a positive one.

"Now what do we do with you?" She asked as she looked him up and down in the harsh, white light that filled the room.

He lifted his mangled hands.

She went through her cabinets and drawers, putting out utensils she would need. At least she was apparently prepared for this kind of work. She also appeared to be used to working alone, placing everything to be in easy reach .

It wasn't surprising to see that the building was apparently equipped with  internal water lines. Money seemed to be the least of this woman's concerns.

She came at him with a small blade, and he had to force himself to sit still and not flinch or try to wrest it away from her as she cut along the seams of his shirt. Money or no, she apparently didn't like waste. While not keen on the idea of threading his hands through the sleeves either, he probably would have just torn it off.

He glanced down at himself. His chest was beginning to show a colorful array of darkening bruises.

Replacing the blade with a rag that she dipped into a bowl of water, she was probably going to wipe away the blood and dirt to gauge the severity of the injuries beneath.

Not now.

"Hands first," he told her.

With a shrug, she dropped the rag back into the water and picked up a syringe. "Just for the pain," she told him.

He shook his head. "No need. I… will manage."

It also wouldn't make any difference on top of the morphine level in his blood. He would have  to find a way to top it up before he entered withdrawal, though.

"As you say."

He could tell she knew her craft as she expertly set the bones and covered his hand in a light bandage. Knowing that only increased his surprise when that seemed to be where her expertise ended.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" he asked scornfully. She was wrapping a new bandage over the first one without bothering with splints.

If she noticed his tone she didn't show it. "Not at all," she replied, stopping a hand's breadth above his wrist before she reached for another moistened rag and for some reason stared applying water to the bandage. "Don't try to move that until I say you can, and hand me that other arm."

Pain finally did catch up with him when she ran her fingers lightly over the area that had connected with the house's corner. "I think there's at least a crack," he pointed out. He tried not to sound as if he was clenching his teeth against her probing hand.

"I fear it's more than a crack," she replied. "Don't worry. It'll heal."

That it would. At least in that location, the bone had some support from the other, uninjured one. She repeated the procedure as on his right hand, this time wrapping his arm close to the elbow.

Next she did wash off the blood that had run down his torso from the cut, which she cleaned up carefully as well. "Lie down," she said. "The less you're moving around  while I'm working with the needle, the less of a scar I'll leave."

As if that mattered. He would have laughed at the statement, but he was pretty sure that his ribs were going to make themselves felt now if he tried. Instead, he did as he was told and focused on the feeling of the needle gliding through his flesh. Again, it was the quick, secure work of someone who had done this often before.

"My name is Nadia, by the way," she said conversationally, just as if she wasn't stabbing him with a pointed object about every ten seconds.

"Erik," he said, not knowing what else to say. Giving his name seemed to be the least he owed her.

"Nice to meet you, Erik," she claimed. She tied off the last suture and helped him sit back up so she could wrap his ribs tightly. Both bruised and broken ones would certainly welcome the limitation of movement.

She got the water bowl again – this time to clean up his face for good. There wasn't anything he could do to stall anymore. No matter how obscured his features had been up to now, she'd see the whole truth of what kind of creature she had rescued in a moment. How far could he get when she threw him out? He could probably make it back to his house, but that had been compromised and was hardly safe.

Her hands were steady and gentle as she worked.

Something must have been wrong with her eyes. Instead of showing any reaction as she exposed his skull-like face, she reached out to carefully run her hand along his cheekbone. "Quite the bruise," she commented. "I expect it'll spread over most of that side of your face, but the bone is undamaged. So – just an inconvenience. There are some minor cuts, probably from stones in the street, and scrapes. All of those should heal without giving you much trouble, as long as they're kept clean. Do you want a mirror for a second opinion?"

A mirror most certainly was the last thing he wanted. He started shaking his head and stopped again quickly as the movement was making him feel light-headed.

"You need to rest."

He nodded.

"Do you have any reason to believe that you're injured anywhere else?" she wanted to know.

She didn't say 'Do you hurt anywhere else' or anything along those lines. Did anything stay unnoticed by that woman?

Oh, right. The matter of his face…

"No."

As he slid over the edge of the cot to stand again, he noticed the bandages around his hands had stiffened as they dried, providing more support to the bones now than any wooden splint could have. He raised his right hand to his face, inspecting the material.

"Roughspun linen soaked in plaster of paris," she told him.

"An ingenious idea," he admitted.

She shrugged. "Not mine, I fear. Antonius Mathijsen, a Dutchman, came up with it a couple of years ago. I came across publications of his method earlier this year. I expect it will spread widely, considering its advantages, but information like this still doesn't travel all that quickly across countries."

Once again he thought of what to say. "You read Dutch?"

"Among others," she said matter-of-factly. "Enough to understand the article in any case. Come now. I'll show you to the guest room. We can talk more tomorrow."

Tomorrow. She still wanted him to spend the night here.

Since it was the only sensible thing to do, he wasn't going to argue. He managed to climb the stairs to the first floor, where the guest room in question was apparently located. If she accommodated patients here more regularly, that was a bad place to put their room, he thought but refrained from commenting on it. He did need a place to sleep after all.

It was a comfortable room, the bed made up ready for the night already, clean and aired out, just waiting for someone to come and take possession of it. Two of the arc lamps were installed and lit. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he would take a closer look at them. He sat heavily on the bed and braced one foot against the heel of his other boot to pull his foot from it. His hair was still filthy with dirt and dried blood, and the idea of soiling the pristine white pillow with it did not appeal to him. His hostess, however, seemed more concerned with getting him to rest than keeping the linens clean. Of course, if she would have wanted that she would have had to wash his hair for him.  Which he couldn't blame her for not wanting to do. He guessed she could have ordered a servant to do the task, but at least she had the good sense to refrain from exposing those to him.

"If you don't mind, I'll return to your place and see if I can find some clothes for you," she said as she watched him get rid of his shoes and stretch out on the bed.

He nodded. He did mind, but he also needed something else to wear in the morning.

She draped the blanket over him and switched off the lights on her way out, leaving him alone in the darkness and wondering what he had just gotten into.

  
Illustration by [Rebekah](mailto:bottled.berry.ink@gmail.com)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I believe my research of history and medicine to be quite sound and thorough, feel free to let me know if I happen to touch upon your personal specialisation and you find any mistakes in my presentation.


	4. Need

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing and no one you recognise is mine.

He woke to the bright light of day, a dull ache in most of his body and throbbing in his hands and ribs, accompanying his body's hints that it would have liked a fresh dose of morphine.

His hostess was sitting in a chair by the bed, legs drawn up under her body and apparently immersed in a book – but not immersed enough to not immediately put it aside when he stirred beyond opening his eyes.

"Are you keeping watch over me?" he asked, his voice half-amused, half-annoyed.

"No," she responded. "I was reading."

"In here."

She shrugged. "So it would seem." Pointing over her shoulder at a cabinet against the wall, she went on: "I brought you some clothes. Your place, I fear, is ruined."

He waited for her to go on. "A man died there. Looks like you trapped the place. It also looks like the others then started tearing up all they could get their hands on. I found a stash of coins and stuff that they apparently missed and brought them over – better than letting someone else wander in and find them, I figured. They're in that drawer." She pointed at the bedside table. Then she reached behind her to a larger table in the room and tossed a little box onto his blanket. He recognized what it was, but he said nothing.

"Yours?" she asked

Now it was his turn to shrug. Why deny it. She'd find out soon enough. "Yeah."

Her face was unreadable "I assume there was morphine in it."

"Was?" The word escaped him involuntarily, and he hated the tone his voice has taken.

"Well, if you had a stash of it, they found it," she explained. "Are you taking it for a reason, or are you quite simply an addict?"

That drew a laugh from him. "Isn't addiction a reason for taking it?"

"Addiction means you'll go into withdrawal soon if you don't get any, and you know as well as I do what cramping muscles are going to do to your fractures." She was still speaking neutrally, stating facts instead of accusing. "I need to know."

He closed his eyes. "It won't be long before I need it."

"How much?"

His eyes shot open again. "What?"

"How much do you need?" she clarified in a tone that brooked no argument and got the answer from him without further evasion. Again, she half-turned to the table.  When she turned back to him, her hand held a syringe.

"Arm," she commanded. She wordlessly bent over him as he offered it and pushed the tip of the needle into his vein with little difficulty. "I'll give you a little less every day, just enough to keep away the withdrawal. I don't care if you take it up again when you've recovered and can get your own, but while you're using my stock, these are the rules. I don't have an unlimited supply, and I need what I have for those who need it as an analgesic."

He wanted to answer that he hadn't demanded and didn't want anything of hers, but stopped himself. He needed that morphine. And she hadn't said that she expected him to stay off of it, just that he wasn't going to get any more of hers than he needed to keep withdrawal at bay.

Lying back, he focused on the warm feeling of the morphine flooding his body. He lost himself in it for a moment – long enough to miss her putting away the syringe and rise to answer a knock on the door.

When he wrenched himself back into reality, she was standing next to him, holding a basket that contained something furry.

"I assume this is yours. It was sitting in your house, begging for food."

His eyes focused on the animal. A white cat – oh yes, that was his. She was wearing his collar, too.

Apparently it was clear enough from his reaction that she had guessed correctly. She unceremoniously dumped the white bundle onto his bed. "Maria fed her downstairs just now, but if you don't want her to lose her lodging rights here, you better make sure she stays out of my things."

The cat, annoyed at being roused from her lazy slumber, got up, stretched and examined her surroundings. Satisfied that if Erik was sleeping here, it must be safe enough for her to do the same, she turned around twice, rolled up on his blanket and half-closed her eyes.

Nadia put the basket on the floor. "I'll be by with lunch in a bit. You slept all the way through breakfast," she told him before she left the room.

He couldn't help but shake his head. What a strange, strange woman. She didn't seem to notice his face, and she didn't seem to particularly mind having a morphine addict under her roof, but the presence of a _cat_ unsettled her…

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	5. Exposure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing and no one you recognise is mine.
> 
> Nadia and her household are.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he still expected to be chased away any moment, and so he did not waste his strength carelessly. After determining that getting up would not make him dizzy, he did do so to have at least a look at the arc lamps. There wasn't much he could tell about them without taking them apart, and that would have to wait for his hands to heal.

He managed to tease open the cabinet and look at what she had brought from his house.

A selection of his shirts and pants were folded up neatly, a waistcoat hung from a clothes hanger, and a coat was thrown over another. The topmost shirt on the stack was a loose, comfortable one without lacings at the sleeves.

After a few false starts, he eventually managed to thread his hands into and through the sleeves and get the shirt to slip over his head. He tugged it in place as best he could with his splinted hands and went back to opening doors and drawers.

Thorough as she had otherwise been, she had apparently entirely neglected to bring along any of his masks.

He sat back down on the bed and peeked out the window, carefully pulling aside the curtains just far enough to look without risking being seen.

The window overlooked a generous walled-in area that was kept neatly but without the groomed appearance of a park. He saw his own white mare grazing among three other horses that had a somewhat shaggier look to them than the one Nadia had ridden last night. That one was not to be seen. Had she gone out again?

The gate was just visible from where he was. He had just decided to watch for her there when someone knocked on his door.

At first, he didn't react. What if it was the servant woman – Maria? He really did not need to expose anyone else to his face.

The knock was repeated. "Erik?"

That was Nadia's voice.

"Come in," he called rather than trying to open the door for her.

She was carrying a tray with a steaming bowl, a pitcher of water and an empty glass.

"It's your house," he pointed out. "You don't need to knock."

Putting the tray on the table, she looked at him with raised eyebrows. "It's your room," she told him.

Instead of arguing, he joined her at the table, sliding into the chair across from her. She pushed the plate - more of a bowl, really - in front of him and poured him water, then settled back and waited.

The bowl contained some kind of thick soup, probably an accommodation for his bruised jaw that would have made chewing rather uncomfortable.

He managed to balance the spoon between his thumb and the rest of his fingers well enough to eat without needing to be fed, which he was quite thankful for. The glass he had to handle with both hands to avoid a risk of dropping and breaking it, but he was satisfied that it did work at all.  He ate in silence.

Nadia said nothing until he put the spoon aside, and then it was merely: "Want some more?"

He shook his head. "When you went through my place…" he said, "didn't you find any masks there?"

She met his eyes. "Plenty," she confirmed.

"Where did you put them? I couldn't find any here." He looked around the room.

"You don't need them now," she said, putting the bowl back onto the tray.

His lips twitched. "Yes, I do."

"Certainly not." Her voice had that matter-of-fact tone that he had heard from her before again. "You're not putting a mask on your face at least until those scrapes have healed. Which they will do much better and faster if not covered up. Besides, have you looked into a mirror recently?"

The very thought made him shudder. "I am not particularly well acquainted with mirrors," he said. "They do not like me and I have no use for them in my home."

It was impossible to tell what she thought of that. "Maybe you should get a bit better acquainted with them then," she suggested. "You're damaging your skin by wearing those tight masks all the time."

"I need them."

"The masks stay off for now." She stood and reached for the tray.

"I need that mask," he insisted again.

"That mask stays off." It couldn't be mistaken for anything but a command now. "You don't need to stay in here if you feel up to being about. I suggest you join me for dinner downstairs tonight if you're not too exhausted by then."

He was rather certain that his shock at that suggestion registered on his face clearly for a moment. "I cannot possibly roam the house without covering my face," he claimed. "Your servants – they might see me. Besides, I do not need dinner. I've never been as fond of food as most of you people seem to be."

She considered him with a strange expression on her face. "You need dinner," she decided. "You're too thin as it is. I could tell the damage to your ribs just from looking at you because they're standing out so much. There's no way you can afford to skip meals. You may be missing out on the enjoyment factor that most others are getting, but you cannot do without the nutrition nevertheless."

"I have never noticed any 'enjoyment factor' about ingesting food," Erik insisted.

For a few seconds, she mutely studied his face. He was feeling quite uncomfortable by the scrutiny, barely resisting the urge of turning away and hiding his deformity as best he could without as mask.

"Be that as it may, it does not reduce your need for what's in the food. Therefore you will have dinner, downstairs or up here."

She went to the door to let herself out, but turned around again before she left the room. "And I can assure you that Maria has seen much worse than that." She indicated his face with a jerky movement of her head. "She's not easily shocked or scared."

Now, that he severely doubted.

"I'm still filthy from… yesterday," he tried another angle. "I can't possibly share your dinner table like this."

"Very well," she began. He was about to take a breath of relief when she went on. "Let me put this away and I'll help you clean up properly. Unless you'd rather I send for a manservant for you."

"You don't need to hire any servants for me!" he blurted out, the very idea so shocking that he couldn't think of a fitting response to the other part of what she had said.

She stepped out of his room. "Fine," she said. "I'll see you downstairs in ten minutes. Bring a change of fresh clothes and don’t make me wait."

With that she closed the door behind herself and left him standing at a loss for words.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	6. Terror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing you recognise is mine.
> 
> I am aware that I'm taking some freedom with Erik's hair as opposed to the books. Call it poetic license.

He would have liked to simply up and leave. He really would have. But that would have required walking the streets of the city unmasked in broad daylight. And while he may have been able to handle simple things, albeit quite awkwardly, even as much as putting money in his own pocket from the drawer in which Nadia had left a surprisingly large amount of his treasure, was beyond him.

Once, he would have stuck around and killed her later for the things she had done and seen, but with his remote conscience that was no longer an option.

And so once again he found himself taking the only path that seemed to have been left open to him and did as he was told.

The master bathroom that he had been allowed to use was as splendid as the rest of this mansion. The woman Maria – or really any servant, for that matter – had been nowhere in sight, and his hostess had gone about her business in the detached, professional manner of one who had done that kind of job plenty of times before for her patients. Did she put up injured strangers at her place on a regular basis? If so it was quite surprising that she still had her wealth, her looks and her sanity. Too many would take advantage of a young woman without a defender.

She had started talking about various things, hinting at subjects from local and wider politics, the war in the east, art and science, obviously probing to see where his interests lay. It was a welcome distraction from the situation at hand, but not one that he allowed himself to become engaged in. He was far too vulnerable at the moment to be able to afford taking his attention off of where she was putting her hands and how.

Eventually it was over and he had obviously neither been murdered nor chased out of the house yet.

Which came close to being preferable, he thought as he cautiously approached the dining hall. The absence of servants was starting to bother him. He had not even seen the woman the other night, but only heard Nadia talk to her. Was there some sinister reason for her remaining unseen? If so, did he even want to know?

He still did not see the point in eating that often, but she had made it quite clear that not skipping meals was one of the prices he was paying for staying here as he waited for his injuries to heal. He was starting to feel like the price she was charging was pretty dear, in spite of not being paid in coin.

He was now dressed in some of his better clothes, dark trousers that he would be able to slip out of without help later, and a shirt similar in cut to the one he had put on earlier. She had tied back his hair with one of those wide velvet ribbons that never seemed to fully go out of fashion. That, too, he would be able to pull off before going to bed, though not to put it back on in the morning. Well, he wasn't _usually_ wearing his hair in that style anyway. He stopped in the doorway, arms crossed diagonally in front of his body, the white a stark contrast against the black silk of his shirt.

Nadia was just finishing up setting the table for two. She looked up at him and smiled. The woman was a good actress, for that smile seemed quite sincere in spite of his naked face.

That moment, realization hit him.

He had been in a situation much like this once before.

Once, only one single time, he had dared defy his mother and appear at the supper table unmasked. It had been supposed to be his first celebrated birthday and it certainly had been the last time any such attempt had been made.

Only back then, his hands had not been bandaged yet when he had come downstairs. That had come later, after he had broken the mirror that his mother had dragged him to upon his insistence to know why he, and he alone, was forced to wear a mask.

Mademoiselle Perrault had smiled that night, too, but not fast enough for him not to remember the expression of revulsion on her face before she caught herself.

Needing something to anchor his eyes on other than the woman by the table, Erik lowered his gaze to his hands, tracing the faint line of an old, jagged scar running up his thumb. A souvenir from that fateful night back then…

It wouldn't stay still.

He was shaking uncontrollably with the impact of the memory rushing back as if it had only been yesterday, reducing him for a moment back to the five-year-old child shown for the first time what lurked behind the mask.

He would have bolted from the room, had he not been frozen in place by the battle against his own mind.

A hand on his arm brought him back to the present with a jerk that almost made him strike out at the intruder. He stopped himself just in time to prevent harm to both his hands and his lodgings and found himself staring into Nadia's face.

She was a tall woman – he hardly had to look down at her. She was also saying something to him that didn't quite make it through to his brain.

Trying to shake off the horror of the memory, he groped for words in vain.

"I can't." was the only thing he choked out eventually.

She tried to coax him forward. "You're shaking. Sit, before you fall over.

He pulled his arm from her grasp and shook his head. "I can't do this," he repeated. "Not like this. Not without—" he raised a hand to his face.

"You can sit down, though." She turned a chair around to face away from the table.

In spite of his efforts to the contrary, shivers were still running through his body as the childish fear kept rushing back in

The woman pulled over another chair and settled slightly to his side.

For a while they sat in silence as she waited for him to calm down again.

"Was it something I did?" she wanted to know eventually.

He almost imperceptibly shook his head. "You didn't… It was me, not you. I…" he stopped. He couldn't tell her about that night. She had seen far too much already. Anything more and he would have to find a reason to justify killing her after all.

With a last deep breath he finally banished the memory to the recesses of his mind where it used to lurk. "I can't pretend I'm just another man," he said. "I am what I am and I have no business exposing normal people to this." He gestured towards his face.

"You're hardly forcing yourself upon me," Nadia pointed out. "If I remember correctly, I invited you."

Erik got to his feet. "I'm going upstairs," he stated without acknowledging her words.

She watched him walk out of the room, rising only when he had already crossed the door. "I'll be up shortly with your meal," she told him.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	7. Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing and no one you recognise is mine  
> Least of all Erik

He was sitting at his table, head lowered onto his crossed arms, when she did.

He looked up when the door opened, trying to gauge Nadia's mood. She didn't seem upset over the scene downstairs.

Instead, she calmly put down the tray she was carrying, picked a steaming mug from it and held it in front of him , leaving him only the option of taking it or risking her dropping the hot beverage into his lap.

Carefully supporting the mug with both hands, he lifted it to his lips to take a hesitant sip.

The hot, thick liquid was sweet, with a slightly bitter hint. Erik stared into the dark drink for a moment, wondering what she was thinking, handing him food this expensive even though she knew he took no particular pleasure from it.

Maybe she was planning to charge him for it when he was leaving. Well, he could afford it.

At least it was soothing. He emptied the mug with another deep gulp, then turned to the contents of the tray.

"Are you doing this often?" he asked between bites. She was obviously not planning on going away without making sure that he was, in fact, eating, and since he was still figuring out ways of using his hands in a manner that did not make him feel like a two year old just learning table manners, eating was going to be a slow affair.

"Am I doing what often?" She settled across from him again with one leg pulled up on the chair under her, a posture he was starting to notice as characteristic for her.

He chewed carefully to give himself time to consider his next move with the cutlery. "Taking in strays."

She shrugged. "Rarely if they come with a cat."

"You have a stable down there," Erik pointed out. "Don't you have cats there?"

Nadia's lips twitched. "In the stables, a cat has a purpose. In the house it is a nuisance." She gave a half-laugh. "What do you figure are the chances for a female physician to find work in this area of the world?"

"Bad, I assume," Erik allowed. "Though I can find no fault with your work." Merely with her attitude.

A nod. "It is different where I grew up. Men are soldiers. We tend to them where necessary. I learned the trade young. My father taught me much."

"Why come here then?" he asked. If she was going to insist on conversation, talking about her was going to be safer than talking about him.

"We were travelling, Father, my brother and I. We were going to visit some colleagues. Exchange insights. Learn new techniques. Oh, you should have seen the faces of some of them when they realized my father's partner was a woman." She chuckled. "This place, it belonged to my father's family. We planned to stay here for a few weeks."

"Apparently you're still here," he observed.

She was looking past him now, probably at her own memories as she recounted. "I got just one comment too much on the female predisposition not running to this kind of profession, womanly weakness and squeamishness. That next day I informed my father that he would be returning with my brother on his own. I was going to stay here and do precisely what I've done since I was strong enough to set a bone. And so here I still am."

His eyes were trained on his plate. "They just left?"

"He knows I'm getting by."

With servants that apparently disappeared at will. He wasn't going to comment on that. "What about your mother?" he asked.

"Never knew her." At least she was still talking in the same matter-of-fact tone as before. "She died giving birth to my twin brother. Our father raised us. He was always travelling to learn more or to be where help was needed, so we did as well. This is probably the longest time I have spent in one place in my life."

A suspicion dawned on him. "Am I delaying your departure?"

There was genuine surprise on her face now. "What makes you think that?" she asked. "I do not intend to leave here anytime soon.

"So your family's wealthy," he changed the subject. That was not the explanation for the strange lack of servants in the house then.

She nodded. "Wealthy enough to permit my father to travel extensively, even as a young man. That's how my parents met. It's the only thing wealth is good for, according to him."

Erik could have named a number of other things it was good for, but refrained from doing so. His plate was empty now, and he carefully maneuvered it back onto the tray.

His hostess got up and collected the tray. "I may not be able to see you until after noon tomorrow," she announced. "Again – feel free to explore the place. If I don't want you in a room, you'll not get into it."

A crooked grin pulled at his lips. "Are you so certain of that?"

"Oh yes," she responded lightly. "At least until you have the full use of your hands back. Which means I have a few weeks to decide on how badly I want to keep you out of those."

With that she turned and left, leaving Erik to wonder what made her think that he would stick around for as much as a moment longer than it took for him to heal.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	8. Refusal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik doesn't belong to me.  
> Maria does.

He didn't leave his room the next morning. The sounds that reached his ears when he cracked open the door told him that life had returned to the house. There were people about.

Instead, he went through his room again, examining every bit of wall, every piece of furniture, in as much detail as he could in his current condition. He wanted to make sure that there were no secret passages, spy holes or other additions that he was not aware of.

After satisfying himself that there did not seem to be any, he sat by the window, watching the string of people coming in and leaving. Some of them were very clearly looking for medical attention. Nearly all of them had a distinctly threadbare appearance to them.

Nadia had been up in the morning, bringing him breakfast and a dose of morphine, then leaving at the sound of the doorbell. She was probably in her downstairs office now, doing her job.

He was idly wondering if he could fashion a mask from the things he had in his room when someone knocked on his door. With a glance at the sky, he figured that it was Nadia with his lunch and called out for her to come in.

He realized his mistake instantly. Having turned around the face the door, he locked eyes with an older, shorter, more corpulent and distinctly Italian woman, who was bringing in the tray.

Although he turned around again immediately, he was aware that the damage had already been done. He had been seen. Still, once again there was no scream.

"Signor?" She asked. "Is anything wrong?"

"No," he hurried to assure her. "Just put it down and I'll eat it in a moment." After she left the room, that was. "There's no need for you to wait." He didn't even understand why Nadia seemed to insist on hanging around until he was done. Maybe she did it to make sure he didn't make the food disappear somewhere instead of eating it, though.

"Very well." He heard the sounds of the table being set, followed by footsteps. Except that they were not leaving the room. They were coming towards him.

Before he could do anything to prevent it, the servant woman had pulled back the curtains from his window all the way and thrown its wings wide open. "You need to let in fresh air," she told him in a voice that bordered on scolding, looking him right into the face. "You shouldn't repay the Signorina's kindness by letting the room deteriorate."

For a moment, he was tempted to point out that not having the window open for a day was hardly going to deteriorate the room. Instead, however, he merely averted his face again, which now had him looking at the table.

"Yes," she said approvingly. "Go and eat. Really, if I'd known how starved you are, I would have brought you better food."

"This will do just fine," he hurried to assure her. "Are you Maria, by any chance?"

"Si." She nodded her confirmation.

"Then you fixed this room for me the other day. I thank you for that." That was the least he could do. He was considering paying her a tip. Coins, however, were beyond his ability to handle at this point. "There's money in that drawer," he told her instead. "Help yourself to an appropriate amount before you leave."

A disdainful snort answered him. "I will be back in half an hour to collect the plates," she told him coolly as she left, taking a wide berth around the drawer in question.  "And keep your money to yourself, Signor."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	9. Truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik isn't mine.

He was up early the next morning, wishing he didn't feel so blastedly curious. Several days of doing essentially nothing were taking their toll on him, though, and Nadia's offer from last night promised at least some distraction.

He had not seen her until dinner, which she brought to his room without asking him downstairs. Maybe she had finally gotten the point.

"Have you been holed up in here all day again?" she asked him as if she didn't know that anyway.

Not considering the question worth an actual answer, he shrugged and sat down to eat.

"That woman Maria brought lunch earlier," he ventured after several minutes had passed in silence.

Nadia nodded.

"I accidentally looked at her when she came in."

"I believe at her age she is quite happy to have men still look at her," she replied with a low chuckle.

He bristled. "That's not what I meant." She didn't volunteer to fill the pause that he left after that sentence, and so he went on eventually. "I don't understand. She did not even seem to notice my face."

"You can be certain that she did notice," Nadia told him succinctly. "I got quite an earful about not telling her you were half-starved."

"I am not half-starved!" he objected, a statement that was answered merely by a pair of mutely raised eyebrows on her end. "Why is she not afraid or disgusted of this?" he passed a hand over his face.

Nadia thought about it silently for a bit. Eventually, she came to a conclusion. "I will show you," she said, "if you really want to know, be up and dressed an hour before sunrise."

While he was not at all certain that he wanted to know, he still was up and dressed at the specified time.

He could hear her move about downstairs and eventually opened his door a crack to see if she was expecting him to come to her.

She was standing by the foot of the stairs, looking up expectantly.

"Are you coming or not?" She called up as soon as she saw his door opening.

Silently, he crept downstairs, only to have a cup of coffee shoved into his hands.

"Are we going to be in trouble if we're delayed if you don't get the morphine before we leave?" she asked.

"Leave?" he almost choked on the hot drink.

"You didn't think I was asking you to meet this early because what I was going to show you is just down the stairs, did you?"

Maybe he had. Maybe he quite simply had not permitted himself to think about it at all. He put down the cup. "I'm not going outside without a mask on."

She reached for a bundle of cloth and shook it out before draping it around his shoulders and slipping the clasp in place. It was a long, loose cloak of plain, dark material.

"I said—" he started, his voice picking up an angry edge.

The folds of a generous hood settled around his face, obscuring part of his sight. "You want to hide, hide in that," she told him. "You'll stand out less cloaked and hooded anyway."

She covered her own attire – which in fact was as plain and dark as the cloak – in a twin of the garment she had just given him, and walked ahead to the parlor, probably aiming for the front door. On the way, she picked up a battered leather bag that looked rather heavy.

Erik hesitated for a moment more, awkwardly pulled the hood better in place, and followed with caution. What had he gotten himself into now?

Someone had saddled two of the shaggy brown horses and tied them in front of the shed. Nadia expertly checked their saddle girths.

"Think you can ride without being led by the rein?" She asked him.

Put in a different tone, he might have taken it as an insult. Coming from her in that same no-nonsense manner that she applied to pretty much everything, it was a request for information and nothing more. "I think so," he answered, carefully acquainting himself with the animal. If the horse was properly trained, he would be able to guide it along using only his legs. He doubted that Nadia would have horses not properly trained.

Still, he would have preferred his own white mare. He didn't complain about it, however. It had not escaped his notice that Nadia was wearing a heavy pistol in her belt, or that she was dressed decidedly shabbier than her usual style. His white was definitely more flashy than these two.

He fished for the stirrup with the tip of his boot. The tack was unusual for Italy. He had seen the like of it before, though never used it. "Cossack saddles?" he asked as he mounted, silently thanking the horse for standing still and making it easy in spite of being unable to grip with his hands.

"Cossack horses," she replied, wheeling hers towards the gate. "They were a gift, once. They're better than they look."

"They look just fine," Erik hurried to assure her and followed. He managed to loop the reins around his hand in a manner that would not disturb the horse's bit but appear like he was holding them at least from afar.

They didn't talk much on the way. Erik kept his head bowed and the hood well in his face, but it did not escape his notice that Nadia was taking them away from the villas and town houses and towards the reeking, dirty, dilapidated part of town.  What was she planning on?

She stopped in front of a building that could not hold more than one room and possibly a hayloft inside and dismounted, dropping her horse's reins to ground-tie it.

Erik did the same and waited mutely.

"Don't contradict me," she warned him in a low voice as she took her bag from where she had hung it from the saddle. She barely waited for his nod before she raised one hand and knocked sharply at the door. The boy who opened seemed barely ten years old. He didn't look like they had woken him, though.

"Morning," he greeted them and stepped aside to make space in the door.

Nadia had to duck her head to get in. So did Erik.

She was apparently a well-known visitor here, even at this time of the day. No one seemed surprised to have her show up just barely after sunrise. Had she been expected?

Erik's gaze wandered around the room. Oh yes, they definitely used this room for everything from sleeping to cooking. What little furniture there was, was hard-worn and often-patched. The same went for the clothes the occupants of the room wore. There seemed to be far too many of those. He counted an older man by the area that served them as a kitchen, a woman in her twenties and four children, including the boy who had opened the door for them, before his attention was drawn to movement in a rear corner. Was that the servant woman Maria back there? The room had only small windows, and the cold smoke that still hung in the air – probably from last night's cooking – didn't make it any easier to see. Their chimney needed cleaning quite badly, he decided.

"This is Erik," Nadia introduced him. "He's a colleague who's staying with me for the moment. I'm letting him have a look at my work."

"Not a surgeon, I trust," the younger woman commented with a pointed look at the white of his bandaged hands where he held the cloak tightly around him.

"Run-in with some robbers," he said before Nadia could answer. "I'll heal. She took care of that."

The older man came forward and offered them mugs with a thin liquid in them that Nadia accepted graciously. Erik took the one presented to him carefully. These people did not need him dropping their tableware. He kept his head lowered, making sure that the hood obscured his face sufficiently. Together with the bad lighting in the room, he was probably safe unless someone pulled back his hood.

"We thank you for taking the effort of coming down here this early in the day, Nadeshda Ivanovna," the man said, addressing her formally. Judging by the way in which Nadia waved it off, it seemed to be a regular ritual. Erik noted that the man had either travelled once, or someone had filled him in on foreign customs. Maybe Nadia herself was not as informal with those who did not share her profession and had taken him, Erik, as a colleague indeed based on his claim to a background in medicine.

Nadia returned the empty cup – Erik had not seen if she had actually drunk the contents or discarded them somehow otherwise – and stepped deeper into the room.

"Erik." She said his name as she might a dog's or child's if she wanted to be followed. He didn't like it, but he jerked forward and did so anyway. Now that they were here, he wanted to see what she was going to show him, and he had an idea that opposing her now would prevent just that.

It was indeed Maria sitting by a bed in that corner. She smiled up at them.

"How is he?" Nadia asked.

The older woman shrugged. "Up briefly yesterday, but as weak as ever." She got up and left her position by the bed to Nadia, she took it.

'He' apparently was the person in the bed. He wouldn't have been able to tell that it was a man without the pronoun. His face was swathed in bandages to the lower edge of his upper lip, leaving free only the space for one – currently closed – eye.

"Matteo," Nadia said, drawing a response by way of an opened eye. "I brought a colleague who I want to have a look at you if you agree."

 A hesitant nod.

Opening her bag, Nadia set out a shallow bowl into which she poured water from a flask. Apparently she didn't trust the local water to come into contact with a patient. He couldn't fault her for it.

After unwinding the outermost layer of bandages, she used a clean rag to drip water onto the next one, soaking through the linen. The groans coming from Matteo suggested that there was quite some pain in spite of it as she teased the cloth free bit by bit.

Erik was thankful for the hood for an entirely different reason now. He was not certain that he had his own face entirely under control when she finally moved aside to give him a clear view.

There was no telling if Matteo had been young or old, handsome or ugly, Italian or foreigner anymore. Something – and Erik could think of a few things that could do this kind of damage – had torn up his face and left only a devastated ruin.

On the right side, the side that retained its eye, some repair had apparently been done. He could see where a flap of skin had been stretched down and stitched in place over what must have been a gaping hole, ridges of scar tissue below and around it suggested smaller wounds that had healed on their own after a fashion.

The left side looked like it belonged in a butcher's shop rather than a human face. The eye was gone, the bones of the socket and cheek apparently shattered and flattened, the flesh raw and oozing in the better-looking places. A hole in the cheek provided a view of the oral cavity, exposing shattered teeth. The upper lip was torn, the nose remained as only a stub towards the root.

Some of the wounds had apparently been cut out already to clear away dead flesh, but Erik could see the traces of new infection.

Apparently Nadia had as well, since she reached back into her bag for some morphine before she set to work with a grimly determined expression on her face.

Unable to do anything to help, he watched her work and carefully cover up the gruesome wounds again.

"Keep on doing what I told you," she instructed Maria at last. "I'll see you in the mansion in two hours."

The older woman nodded to her and stood aside as Nadia repacked her bag and closed it with an audible snap.

As they approached the door, the other woman left the children, whom she had kept from getting too close to where Nadia was working, crossed the room with a canvas-wrapped bundle that she held out for the physician to take. "Thank you, Alessia," Nadia said as she reached for it. "You're working fast."

Alessia shrugged wordlessly, apparently unsure of what to do with the compliment.

"I may have more work for you soon if you can spare the time," Nadia told her, which earned her a fleeting smile and a nod.

As she turned towards the door again, Alessia spoke in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. "How long?"

Nadia looked back at her, her face serious and unsmiling now. "I don't know."

She ducked out of the door without waiting for an answer. Erik followed, collecting the reins of his horse and mounting quickly.

For a few minutes, they rode in silence. Then Nadia spoke up. "Alessia is Matteo's wife," she told him. "Maria is his mother. Their family has been living in that hovel for a long time. It's getting worse for them with their main source of income gone."

"What happened?" Erik heard himself asking. When had he decided to do that?

"The precise how and why will probably remain a mystery," Nadia said. "All I know is that he ended up being hit by a load of buckshot at close distance. You saw the damage it did. They expected him to die – everyone did – and when he didn't they eventually came to me. By the time I got to him, infection had already set in, and you saw the result. I wasn't the first they asked to come either, but no one else would do that kind of work, not for someone who hardly has the money to feed and clothe their children, certainly not for someone who most likely will still die instead of paying off debt at some point."

"And you're doing that out of the good of your heart?" his voice had a scornful undertone now.

She laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. "No," she admitted. "I'm doing it because just as I am the only one willing to treat the likes of them, the likes of them are the only ones willing to be treated by the likes of me. Or, well, me, considering there's only one of me around. I trade medical attention for work more often than not. There's just no point in charging money from those who have none and will never have enough of it to pay for more than the bare necessities."

"So you're taking away their opportunity to earn at least that little by tying up their working time?" he asked. He wasn't accusing her, but the problem was too plain in  his mind to not be mentioned.

"Maria has free run of the kitchen and the permission to take food home to her family as she sees fit, so it's not like she's getting nothing at all out of the bargain besides a doctor for Matteo. Alessia sometimes does some laundry and sewing for me. That," she indicated the bundle, "are your things, by the way. The ones those brutes tore up when they were taking your place apart."

That was a surprise. He didn't say anything for a moment.

"She does good work," Nadia went on. "If you  find anything's looking too patched-up to be worn by you anymore, I know plenty of people who would be happy to have them, though, if you don't mind."

He considered that for a moment. "Just give the lot of it away then," he decided. "I have more than enough to wear."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik does not belong to me.

"Aren't you getting bored holed up in that room all day?" She asked him when, upon returning, he made straight for the stairs.

He stopped with a shrug. His discomfort at being seen by people was still too much to let him explore the house during the day, though he had started thinking about doing just that once everyone had gone to bed.

"Let me show you something." She waited as he considered for a moment. She had shown him quite enough already that morning.

Nevertheless, he turned back around, awaiting further instructions.

She beckoned him to follow her and went to a door that led off the parlor to one side.

"My father may believe that the main use for wealth is travelling," she said as she opened it wide. "But I've figured out a few uses for it even while staying in one place."

The sight made him stop in his tracks as he laid eyes on the room behind and took in the rows of shelves filled tightly with books. Even from here he could see that some were mere notebooks, while others must have been bought from collectors. Most seemed to be the in-between variety, affordable but still quite astonishing at this number.

A low table and a set of armchairs filled the central space in the room that wasn't taken up by the bookshelves.

"You might find this more interesting than staring at blank walls," she suggested.

He looked around. The room had windows, but they were facing to the side, not towards the entrance. The armchairs could be turned around to face away from the window, or he could pull one into a corner that couldn't be viewed from outside to begin with. The books were beckoning to him.

With a nod, he walked up to the first shelf, browsing the titles.

"Do you like what you see?" Nadia asked after a few minutes of watching him slowly move up one shelf and down the next.

Turning back around, he nodded his head again. "Thank you," he said. "This should keep me occupied for… as long as it takes."

"Just put them back where you got them from after you're done with them. They're sorted and I'd hate having to search the shelves because someone rearranged them." She seemed to consider saying something more, but hesitated.

"I will," he hurried to assure her. "I'll make—"

The door to the library opening again interrupted him.

A boy came rushing in, skidding to a stop in front of them.

"Sorry I'm late!" he panted as he pulled the carry strap of a bag over his head and slammed the bag onto the table. "I was—" He stopped short as he noticed Erik. "I didn't know you had company. Good day, Signor."

Erik barely resisted the urge of running from the room and muttered a greeting instead. The boy was dressed in patched but clean clothes the original color of which could no longer be determined. He didn't have the grimy look of those living in squalor, though. The bag he had put down was leather, old and scuffed but sturdy enough.

His face had registered something as he had first noticed Erik's face, but it hadn't been horror. Surprise, maybe. By now it had been replaced by something else.

Was that curiosity?

"Erik, this is Lorenzo, my apprentice," Nadia informed him calmly. "Lorenzo, Erik is a colleague of mine who had a bit of a run-in with robbers and is staying for a while."

She turned back to Erik. "He joined me a couple of months ago. He's living with his aunt and uncle and comes here during the week. He gets Sundays off."

Everyone in her household had Sundays off, it seemed. That certainly explained why the house had been entirely devoid of servants that one day. He guessed the boy's relatives didn't have the money to have him apprenticed to anyone else if they let him come here. He estimated him to be around thirteen.

There were sounds outside.

Maria had apparently arrived and silently let herself in in the meantime. A knock on the door sounded, followed by her voice. "Signorina, there's work for you."

"I'll be out in a moment!" Nadia called back. "Erik…"

Now she was surely going to send him back to his room. Maybe he could at least take along a book or two.

Instead, she surprised him again.

"Would you mind going over Lorenzo's assignments with him – that is, if he did them?"

The boy nodded vigorously and a trace affronted by the suggestion that he might not have. He reached for his bag.

"It's not exactly medical," Nadia went on, "but there's a few other skills he needs to acquire."

Erik was at a loss for words. That was the last thing he had expected. "I've never taught before," he said.

"It's not difficult," the boy piped up. "She can do it!"

That earned him a swat to the back of his head from Nadia. "You could try," she told him. "If it doesn’t work out, I'm just around the corner in my office and you can send him over. And I promise I'll take him off of your hands after lunch at the latest, so you can have time to enjoy the books on your own."

"Yeah," Lorenzo confirmed. "You could try. I only started the reading and writing stuff two months ago, and I'm not very good at it yet, so you won't be at risk of being outdone."

One thing that boy was certainly not lacking was self-confidence.

"You don't mind looking at this as you study?" Erik heard himself asking as he passed a hand over his face. For some reason, his mouth kept running away with him recently.

Lorenzo shrugged. "I've seen people close to starving before," he said.

"I'm not close to starving," Erik muttered under his breath.

He thought he heard Nadia fail at suppressing a giggle as she retreated to the door.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik does not belong to me.

He settled into life at Nadia's household eventually. In the course of the next weeks, his days were spent mainly in the library, working his way through book after book. The apprentice boy joined him for a few hours in the morning, stumbling through his reading and writing assignments before joining Nadia for the more hands-on instruction. He certainly wasn't a natural, but he was working hard enough.

Nadia brought lunch for the three of them to the library now. They had dinner after the last patient and Lorenzo had left. It would have been a lie if he had claimed that he got used to not wearing his mask, but it did lose some of its horror. It was hard to insist on needing it when no one had the decency to react to what they saw. Still, he did his best to stay away from where the patients were.

He had figured out the servant pattern by the end of the first week. Maria was there for two days at a time, staying the night, before having one day off. Sometimes someone else filled in on that day, sometimes Nadia simply took care of her own things. There were two men who took turns at showing up before sunrise to take care of the stables. Apparently those two could read, because Nadia left them instructions pinned to the stable door if she wanted anything done out of the ordinary or her horse saddled in the morning. Sometimes, someone would come in for a single day to take care of some special work such as laundry.

Apart from the work, she apparently took anything for payment that people were offering to part with, and there was a continuous stream of useless trinkets that she passed on to those who could use them, sometimes taken apart into their pieces to be used as raw materials for new things, or gave to younger patients as toys.

What house calls she made were made early. Once a week, she set up shop in town for those who could not or would not come to the mansion. Lorenzo came with her on those days, and Erik had the house to himself. He suspected that she might have come back from one of those days the day she found him.

She also disappeared somewhere for a few hours after dinner on most days. He didn't ask her where she went and she didn't venture to tell him on her own.

Three weeks after his arrival, he stopped her after dinner. He knew his body's healing powers, and he was quite certain that his hands and fingers had had enough time to mend by now.

Apparently she trusted him enough to judge his own progress, since she simply took him to her office to cut away the splints.

His fingers felt somewhat stiff after being immobilized for a while, but he could tell the fractures had healed well. He carefully flexed his hands, trying out the range of motion of each joint slowly. The hands were fine, but his arm started aching quickly.

Carefully, he ran his right hand up and down the damaged bone in his left forearm, trying to gauge its condition.

"I can splint that again without impairing the use of your hand," Nadia offered.

Erik considered for a moment. If he had the use of his hands, he should be able to take off a splint on his arm when the time came. It wouldn't keep him from being on his way at first light in the morning. It would certainly be safer to protect the healing bone. He held out his arm for her with a nod.

"I'll take my leave then," he told her as she worked. "If you'll tell me how much I owe you I'll pay you in the morning."

"Keep your money." Her voice sounded oddly cold and harsh as she said it. "I have no use for it."

Very well. If she wanted to work for free then so be it. Maybe she was so happy to be rid of him that that was payment enough.

As he watched her work, he reconsidered. She had patched him up, fed him for three weeks, let him use her library… he owed her something.

"I'll work it off then," he said. He didn't make it a question.

"Any specific task you're thinking about?" she wanted to know.

He considered for another moment. "I could go over the house and see if anything needs fixing or improvement. The decoration by the upper windows for example – it's being worn away by the weather. It could use a going-over."

She looked at him. "Are you a stonemason as well as a physician?"

"More of a stonemason than a physician," he admitted. "Stonemason and architect, you could say."

"Didn't you say you have a background in medicine?" she went to wash her hands, and he looked at her work. His wrist was encased in the splint, but his fingers were left free to use. He knew better than to try that before the bandage had hardened, though.

"I was taught much about diseases and herbal cures by an old gypsy wise-woman," he said, feeling he owed her at least something by way of an explanation. "I learned more on my own, later, during my travels. I can brew remedies for most things I might encounter, mend injuries, set bones, but first and foremost, I work with stone."

"You're a multitalented man," she said as she put away her supplies. "Very well. Take care of the masonry if it makes you happy. Tomorrow. Tonight, I have something else to show you."

He slid off of the cot, still exercising the fingers of his right hand. It felt as if they were getting closer to their usual dexterity by the second, although he was well aware that it would take days to truly recover all his skill. "Every time you say that, you drop some kind of surprise on me," he pointed out. "I do not like that."

"You'll like this one," she claimed with a grin.

Unconvinced, he shook his head. "And I would thank you for returning my masks now. My face must have healed by now."

She sighed. "Will you at least consider leaving it off at home?" she asked. "It's…"

"…damaging my skin, you said so before," he cut her off. "I'll think about it."

Holding open the door, she waved him through before her.

"I didn't take you for a gypsy," she commented when they walked down the hallway side by side.

"Would it make a difference if I were?" Erik asked.

The question made her stop and turn towards him. "No." she said. "But it's rare for a  gypsy to settle in the stone house."

She had a point there. "I'm not," he said. "I travelled with a caravan for three years. At first they displayed me for money, as the Living Corpse. Later I displayed myself. It brought in plenty of money. I left them eventually."

"Is that why you don't like people seeing you?"

Why couldn't she just stop asking questions?

"No. What were you going to show me?" Maybe a question of his own would take care of that.

Apparently she took the hint. In any case, she went to the first door along the hallway after the parlor. It was usually locked. He had tried it several times. She had been right that without proper use of his hands there was no way he could pick the lock.

Pulling a key ring from her pocket, she unlocked it and threw it wide to expose a set of stairs spiraling downwards. She descended without checking if he followed.

"The things I keep down here are those I don't want any random hands on," she said. "Sensitive things, things that break easily, things with small pieces that should not get lost.

The stairs too them down into a room lined with workbenches  covered in tools and materials. Scribbled-on paper of different sizes was lying around. Erik saw half-assembled arc lights, as well as other bits that he recognized as pieces using or producing electricity.

"You're an inventor in your spare time?" he asked, amused.

Nadia laughed. "Oh no," she said. "I like building things to instructions. It keeps my hands exercised. I don't get to do a lot of surgery these days. But I only reproduce what others have invented."

Erik picked up the closest instruction sheet. It had apparently been torn from a journal. He frowned. "This can be improved," he stated.

"Be my guest." She perched on the corner of a tabletop and watched him. "Just promise to let me know if you use up anything and it needs to be replaced. I hate being surprised by things having run out."

"Sure." So would he, if the situation was reversed.

Looking up from the plan, he noticed a door leading out of the room. "What's back there?"

Instead of answering, she went and opened the door, standing aside to let him through.

In this room, the walls were lined with shelves holding a collection of a kind Erik had never seen before. There were glasses filled with a clear liquid in which bits and pieces were floating. Some held entire organs, preserved probably in alcohol.

The large sheets of paper stacked on one of two tables showed detailed drawings of human body parts, cross-sections that suggested the artist had actually used a model to work from.

"I didn't actually kill anyone for this," she assured him as he looked around. "The donors were dead already by the time I relieved them of these parts. It's not like they needed them anymore, and I can use them for studies.

He held up a sheet showing a series of drawings of a human arm, each lacking one more layer. The bottom-most was reduced to the skeleton.

The one below it had a life-sized representation of a human liver, according to the notes on the page, followed by an enlarged drawing of the same in a cross-section. While Erik was aware of a number of poisons that would affect this organ, as well as remedies for as many complaints caused by it, he had never actually seen one.

Curious, he looked at the next paper.

"I'll trade my knowledge for yours if you want to," she offered.

"I'd like that," he replied. Not least because he could just imagine how furious the old gypsy wise woman would have become had she known he was passing on her secrets to a complete outsider. Looking back at the sheets, he finally realized what had been nagging at the back of his mind since he had picked them up.

"You labeled them in French," he observed in his native language.

"Yes," she replied in the same language. "They were meant just for me. I didn't know you spoke French."

Her French was flawless.

"I was born in France," he told her as he studied the next drawing.

"So was my father." She handed him another set of sketches. "Many speak French in Russia. Especially the upper classes, but also military officers … I've met many who didn't speak Russian at all."

Erik nodded. He was well aware of that, having travelled Russia when he had still exhibited himself at fairs. "I speak Russian," he said, switching languages again. "We can talk in any language you're most comfortable in."

"It's nice to hear French again," she replied. "But let's stick with Italian while there are others around. We don't want to be impolite."

"We don't?" Erik asked her, feigning surprise.

She laughed. "Not more so than absolutely necessary," she decided. "I'll go back upstairs now. Feel free to stay here for as long as you wish. We can start on our mutual instruction tomorrow. Oh, and Erik?"

He looked at her just in time to see her toss a small object at him. He caught it out of reflex.

"Lock the door behind you when you go back upstairs."

After a moment of staring at the key he had just gotten, he pocketed it and put aside the drawings to go back into the other room. Time to study those arc lights.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik isn't mine.

It felt good to be riding properly again, knowing he'd be able to handle whatever might be thrown at him. He carried his knives and lasso in the usual places and a pistol in his belt – shifted so that he could draw with his right hand. Supported or not, he didn't want to subject his healing bone to the recoil.

Riding out to acquire a new stash of morphine, he had found himself in a bit of a quandary.

He knew exactly where to go and who to talk to, but the closer he came, the more aware he became of one thing. Nadia would be disappointed.

Why would that be a problem? he asked himself. It had been a long time since he had cared about what someone thought of what he did.

Apart from that, he knew she wasn't going to give him any trouble about it. If she noticed – and she would notice, she was entirely too perceptive to miss it – she would silently take note of it and go about her own business, as long as she wasn't expected to provide the drug.

But she'd slowly, day by day, weaned him off of the morphine without making him go through the withdrawal…

She'd probably like it if he stayed off it.

She'd probably be disappointed if he didn't even if she didn't show it.

He didn't want to disappoint her.

Cursing himself under his breath, he urged his horse forward. He would buy that morphine and take the first dose right there. That should take care of _that_. He wouldn't let some woman tell him what to do or not to do!

Except that she didn't.

And he wasn't missing it that much anyway. His body was pretty much over it.

He didn't have to take it up again.

It might even be quite pleasant to never go through the reaction of starting or almost starting withdrawal again.

But the morphine was what made his life bearable. Living with his face, barely tolerated at best by those around him, bringing fear to those who saw behind the mask…

And right now, none of that was true.

That train of thought brought a different source of discomfort to his mind: an entirely physical one.

He could not remember his masks ever having been so blastedly uncomfortable. Three weeks and apparently he had gotten used to feeling the air move on his face.

Nadia kept claiming that he could work side by side with her and no one would mind. The people who came to her for treatment were less easily spooked than the pampered middle and upper class members who came to the fair ground for the pleasant horror of seeing the 'freaks' there.

Erik was aware that with all of his travels, and in spite of being the content of plenty a story that parents may threaten their children with, his experience of the world was still limited to a narrow slice.

His mother had protected him from the outside worl as much as she had protected herself from people's reaction to him. Among the gypsies, his contacts had been limited to them and the sight of the spectators. Travelling on his own, he had kept contact with the other travelling people to a minimum, and with everyone else to the absolutely unavoidable. The Shah's court had hardly been representative of society as a whole either.

Well, he could make his decision about the morphine later and see if what Nadia claimed was true. Were the people who came to her for treatment indeed used to seeing faces disfigured even remotely like his?

He couldn't deny that Matteo – who according to Nadia still lingered, but was failing rapidly now from recurring infection – looked bad. But that was surely an exception, an accident or some joke gone horribly awry.

Turning his horse towards the poorer quarters, he considered.

He'd make a bet with himself. If he saw three looking like they were remotely comparable to him walking the streets openly, he'd stop wearing his mask at Nadia's place.

Usually when he went anywhere, he kept his eyes on where he was going, focusing on getting there and out of the open as fast as possible.

Now he forced himself to look around as he let his horse amble along slowly, and tried to take in as much detail as possible and scanning the faces of those passing him.

To many of the people living in this part of town, his fairground tent would have equaled a palace. Far too many of the buildings looked like they were going to come down on the heads of their inhabitants any moment.

He spotted a man standing by the side of the street, selling pies of an indeterminable origin. He had apparently been touched by fire at some point in his life. His face was a single mass of twisted scar tissue. The eyes seemed uninjured, but the only patch of healthy skin seemed a roughly palm-sized area on his cheek. Much of the hair along one side of his head was gone as well.

Erik stopped his horse by the man and brought some small coins from his pocket.

"I'll take two of those," he told the man. He had thought of him as old on first sight, but close-up his age was indeterminable. The hunched posture may as well have been owed to injury as to age.

Pies and coins changed their owners. Erik pocketed the pies. He would get rid of them somewhere. There was no telling what they had been made of.

That was one down, two to go, and not even five minutes into his ride.

He noted that most people he passed would have qualified as ugly by the standards of those who used to come to the fairgrounds to see him. Hunger and a hard life left their marks on everyone, but it was not the kind of ugly he had come to find.

There was a woman herding a group of children – her grandchildren or maybe even great-grandchildren, he guessed – before her. If she had once been beautiful, her looks must have been thoroughly ruined a long time ago by the crisscross of knife wounds that still decorated her face as thick, red and white scars. Her nose was crooked and flattened towards the end, one eyelid drooped.

"Woman!" he called out, steering his mare over when she stopped and turned. Again he counted out a few of his smaller coins and offered them to her. "For the children," he told her.

Ignoring her profuse thanks, he wheeled his horse and trotted away. He didn't fool himself. That money was as likely to be put into alcohol as into something for the children.

Just around the next corner, he spotted a younger man who sported a widely cleft lip. He was sitting in front of a building, drinking greedily from a clay mug containing an amber liquid – some cheap brandy, Erik figured.

The man stared challengingly up at the rider when he noticed Erik's eyes on him.

As he was still trying to decide whether the man was disfigured enough to count, leaning more and more strongly against it by the second, he spotted movement and cursed himself for focusing on his surroundings so much that he hadn't paid enough attention to his direct proximity.

A small hand was withdrawn quickly from the bag suspended from his saddle, clutching something, and the thief took off at a headlong dash through the street.

Not wanting to risk his horse on the cobblestones, Erik slid from the saddle and followed, trusting in his horse to either stay where it was or follow him at a more leisurely pace.

Dodging people in the street, he followed the child. Keeping her in sight wasn't an easy task. She knew the area well, and he was new to it, but the patched skirt and shawl she wore had once been colorful and still served as enough of a marker to prevent him from losing her.

He rounded the corner of a stone building that was crumbling in places, the door already blocked by fallen chunks of stone and wood, and stopped.

The child was nowhere to be seen. He looked down the street, hoping for a telltale flash of clothing and got nothing. Yet she couldn't be far. Maybe she had dodged into one of the buildings. If they had back doors, she'd be gone by now.

As he turned around to return to his mount, he noticed something, and his lips twitched into a grin. There was a gap in the thick stone wall of the building he had just rounded. How would the chances be that she'd gone in there?

Knife in hand, just in case he was walking – or crawling – into an ambush, he crouched down in front of it. It would be a narrow fit, but he'd manage to get in.

He moved quickly, hoping that the element of surprise would work in his favor. Sliding through the opening, he got back on his feet in one fluid motion and looked around.

He could just stand upright in the room. The ceiling still held, though he wouldn't have taken any bets about how long that would remain the case.

The inside of the building was indeed inhabited. As usual, his eyes adjusted quickly to the near-darkness, and he scanned the number of makeshift beds on the floor, the few possessions scattered in the room.

A bundle of rags was pressing itself into a corner, apparently trying hard not to move or make a sound. He recognized the patterning.

He moved over, walking in a straight line through the center of the room, and stopped right in front of her.

"I think you have something that belongs to me," he said. He hadn't even checked what she had taken. Going after the thief had been as much reflex as decision.

A grimy hand sneaked out of the bundle, offering him one of the pies he had put away earlier, looking rather crushed now.

He shook his head. "I'm not sure you want to eat that," he said. "Why don't you come out of that corner and we'll talk about it."

He didn't doubt the child was hungry. Maybe, if she'd not make too much of a fuss over his mask, he'd buy her a proper meal.

The motion under the shawl could have been interpreted as a shake of a head and was accompanied by an indefinable sound.

One hand still on his weapon, he reached out with the other to pull away her cover. The girl tried to hold on to it for a moment, but his tug was stronger than any half-starved child could have been.

The cloth fell away, and he gaped in shock at what faced him.

The child could not be much older than eight, ten at most if he allowed for shortness of food and bad living conditions, but her face was a ruin already. It looked like something had eaten large chunks out of her jaw and cheek, chewed up her lips and destroyed part of one eye socket. Scar tissue had formed and contorted her remaining features into a grotesque caricature hardly recognizable as a human face.

She uttered sounds, but the damage slurred her speech too much for him to make out what she was trying to tell him.

He let go of the shawl she had covered herself with.

She took it back, but didn't bother putting it back over her head. Of course she had no way of knowing just how well he could see with little light around.

His hand felt unsteady as he replaced his blade and reached for his money bag instead. The pies were probably barely good enough to be turned into dog food, and certainly not for human ingestion. He went through his coins. Picking out those of a small enough denomination to not give her any trouble when she tried to spend them, he laid out small stacks on the floor between them.

Wide-eyed, she stared, apparently hardly believing what she saw. Eventually, he stuck the rest of his money back into his belt and nodded at her before he turned to leave.

After a second's consideration, he turned back, pointing at the few armfuls of straw and rags next to her that barely covered the floor. "Yours?"

She nodded hesitantly.

Without thinking about how to explain its loss to Nadia, he slid out of the cloak. He tore out and pocketed the clasp, then draped the cloth over the scant padding. It would have been far too large to do her any good as a garment, but it would make an acceptable blanket.

Nodding to her briefly, he moved back to the gap in the wall and slid outside, his mind still trying to process what he had just seen.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik's not mine.

"You're preoccupied," Nadia observed when she had put him in check mate the third time in a row. Usually, he won two out of three games, and any one of their matches took longer than the three they had played that night already.

"I went to town today."

She waited, not saying anything.

He reached out to set up the chess pieces again.

"There was a girl… maybe ten years old."

She still waited, though he thought he saw a glint in her eyes that may have suggested she knew what was coming.

"Her face was hardly human anymore. It was…" words failed him. After groping for the right description for a few seconds, he pulled a pencil and a folded piece of paper that contained drafts for stonework he had discarded and intended to feed the fireplace with from his pocket and did a rough sketch on the reverse.

Nadia glanced at the result.

"There is a disease," she explained, calmly. "It preys only on those already weakened by hunger. Usually children. Most die within a few weeks. They're the lucky ones. The survivors – you apparently saw one today."

Taking back the paper, he put it out of sight. "Do you mean to say they all look like that?" he asked. "Those who die are lucky because they don't have to go on living like that?"

A shake of her head preceded her answer. "You don't understand." She leaned forward and her tone changed to what he imagined she would sound like when instructing Lorenzo. "The disease eats through their skin, flesh and bone. The damage doesn't stop. If it goes back far enough they will eventually suffocate. If it doesn't, the muscles and joint in their jaws will lock up eventually. They lose the ability to chew. Sometimes they will be unable to open their mouths to put anything into them at all. They starve. They die of infections… Most of them don't survive more than a year or two because of all those things, and they die a lot harder than those who don't survive the fever that starts it all."

She paused until he nodded for her to go on.

"It's not contagious," she said. "No one who is otherwise healthy and strong will catch it. But people find that hard to believe. Their families cast them out, afraid of it spreading to them as well. Any large city you come to, you're likely to find some of these children."

Erik shuddered involuntarily at the thought. "I caught her trying to steal from me and went after her. It looked like there were others living in the place she hid in."

Nadia nodded. "There are a few. Their leader is sixteen or seventeen. He's mildly enough affected to probably survive well into adulthood if no one sticks a knife in him some day, but still enough to be shunned out of fear.  He's taking as much care of them as he can."

So that was where the tolerance of these people regarding facial damage ended. Erik knew he should have reminded himself that they most likely felt like there was a potentially fatal threat to them from that disease, but he didn't want to.

"Her name is Isa," Nadia went on.

He looked at her non-comprehendingly. Had he missed part of what she was saying?

"The girl you drew," she clarified. "And she must be growing weaker and slower if you caught her stealing."

"You mean to tell me she's usually a better thief than that?" he asked with a hint of a smile before getting serious again. "Do they come to you for treatment?"

"Rarely. It's no easier to convince them that they're no danger to people than to convince anyone else. If they do, they get the same treatment as everyone else."

He felt that there was something more.

"If one of them asked for the opposite…" Erik kept a close watch on her face to gauge her reaction.

Meeting and holding his eyes, she responded in the same calm voice as before. "I know how to dispense a quick and painless death when one asks for it." Pause. "I know as well as they do how hard they die otherwise, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."

When. She had said when, not if.

He could have used some of the morphine now, to quiet his thoughts, but he had forgotten all about that when he had returned to his horse earlier that day. Instead of finishing the business he had originally gone to town for, he had turned back to the mansion without getting his shopping done.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik still isn't mine...

For three weeks after the attack he had gone unmasked, and he had gotten somewhat used to it. Now that he was doing it by choice, however, instead of to follow doctor's orders, it was as if those three weeks had never have existed. Once again, he was battling the urge to turn towards the wall, run from the room, raise his hands to shield the unsuspecting onlooker from the horrors of his face.

It had been easier when Nadia had not left him a choice. When his mask had not waited in a drawer next to his bed, ready to be taken and used again. Now all he would have to do is bolt back upstairs, get it out and that would be that.

Day by day, he forced himself to walk with his back straight, proudly facing forward, not down, not to jerk away when someone rounded a corner, to return nods and quick greetings, waiting for the day on which it would get easier.

Deep inside, he always expected a scream or other expression of horror.

He fought to quell the guilt that he felt over enjoying the air and sun on his face.

Once he had finished his work on the upstairs wall decoration, he had started giving the entire building a good going-over. Nadia had let him. She really didn't seem to be that intent on getting rid of him. He had a feeling that if they were aiming to exchange all of their respective knowledge, they would end up spending years together in those basement rooms, alternating between the roles of teacher and student.

Now he was sitting in the library, sketching out suggestions for adjustments to the building that he wanted to run by Nadia before placing any orders.

A knock on the door interrupted him.

At first, he ignored it, but it didn't take long before it was repeated.

He sighed. It was early – very early. Nadia was out on one of her morning house calls and neither Lorenzo nor any of the servants had come in yet.

When the knock sounded a third time, Erik forced himself out of his armchair and out of the library. Someone had to open that door and apparently that someone was him. He silently hoped that it was someone who knew him already.

That wish, at least, was granted to him. The man waiting to be left in was something of a regular. The first time Erik had met him, Nadia had treated a badly infected wound on his leg that had long since healed. The next time, he had brought his son. Erik's concoctions had done more for the boy's cough than Nadia's remedies, as she willingly admitted.

This man was one of the few exceptions from the rule. He didn't come to Nadia for treatment because he didn't have the money to pay anyone else for it. He did it because Nadia didn't care about how he got by that money in the first place.

He was the village hangman, shunned by the 'honorable' citizens for the work he did. Erik wondered what they'd do if some day he simply up and quit.

Greeting Erik with a nod and a half-smile that was his closest approximation to a friendly face, the man gestured towards something he had apparently left outside the gates.

"I have a package for the doctor."

"Nadia's not here," Erik said. "If you can't return later, maybe we have leave it in the library for her. I'll make sure she gets it."

Was that man trying to stifle a laugh?

"I fear," he said with an odd tone to his voice that suggested that that was precisely what he was doing, "It's not the kind of package suitable for being left in the library. Or to be caught with once people start going about their business. I don't assume you have the keys to that cellar door?"

The one that led to the lab?

"What if I did?"

"Then you could unlock it and I could take it where we always put them," the man suggested.

Erik considered. What would a hangman be able to deliver that Nadia needed in the downstairs laboratories?

The realization hit hard and fast, and he stepped aside to clear the path.

"I'll have it open by the time you bring it in."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik isn't mine

He didn't get any opportunity to talk to Nadia that morning beyond exchanging a quick greeting when she came in. When they came over to join him for lunch, both she and Lorenzo looked exhausted.

When she had cleared half of her plate, he decided it was time to fill her in.

"A package arrived for you this morning," he said.

She looked up. "Really?"

She must have been truly tired if that was all she could muster.

"He said it should be put in the basement as usual."

Her expression changed.

So did Lorenzo's. Apparently the boy knew about packages left in the basement as well.

Nadia sent a grin his way. "Then I guess we know what we'll be doing this afternoon," she said. "Erik, would you care to join us?"

"Yes," he said, and only realized as he did so how much he meant it. The curiosity he felt at the prospect was insuppressible once he admitted to its presence.

“Change into something you won’t mind getting stained,” she suggested as she resumed eating. “No matter how carefully you work, there will be some.”

“I don’t have a change of clothes here,” Lorenzo pointed out.

Nadia chuckled. “You won’t need one,” she told him.

“Yeah,” the boy muttered, clearly not amused, “because all I’ll be doing is take notes.”

That earned him an amused grin from his teacher. “Oh yes,” she said.

“How much longer?” he asked.

The way this sounded, it probably was a recurring exchange.

Nadia’s smooth reply sounded like an often-repeated statement as well. “Until you have learned all you can learn from taking notes.”

“When will that be?”

“That depends entirely on you,” Erik couldn’t resist throwing in, only to realize that Nadia was saying the precisely same thing. They mutely looked at each other for a second before they both started to laugh.

“Great.” The apprentice put aside his utensils and pushed his plate towards the center of the table. “Now there’s two of you, I’ll never get a break.”

 

Half an hour later, they met again in the basement. The ‘package’ was lying on a worktable in a small room behind the specimen storage room that was lit using arc lights and mirrors to make it bright as daylight. Lorenzo slid behind a small desk positioned so that he would be able to oversee everything that was done around the table, and put out pencils, ink, a pen, knife and paper. He wasn’t complaining, but he still wasn’t happy.

Nadia stood at the table across from Eric. “Shall we?”

He nodded.

With a swift movement, she pulled away the cloth.

The body was that of a woman in her early thirties. Her neck was angled oddly.

“The hangman pays you in a strange currency,” Erik observed. “Isn’t this dangerous for him?”

“I only get those who have no family to claim their bodies or anyone else interested in them,” Nadia explained.

“What would she have done to deserve a hanging sentence?” Erik mused. His eyes went up and down the corpse. This was probably the closest he would ever come to a naked woman, he mused.

The boy spoke up. “Drowned her child after giving birth.”

Erik looked at him in surprise.

“What he said,” Nadia confirmed with a nod. “For one thing, it’s the main reason a woman gets sentenced to death, for another you can be certain that our Lorenzo was right there when they carried out the sentence. He still gets the youth’s morbid sense of entertainment from the likes of that.”

“There’s plenty of older folks watching, too,” Lorenzo objected quickly.

“Whatever,” Nadia said flatly. “I can think of better entertainment than watching people die. However, since this one is already dead now, she may as well be put to some use.”

She held out a small but sharp knife to Erik. “If you do the work, I’ll focus on preparing specimen and making some additional drawings,” she suggested. “Pick whatever interests you most.”

Erik accepted the blade and considered. Of course he knew roughly where what was located in the body and in which locations an injury, such as from a dagger, was most likely to be fatal. How much more efficient could a person be if he had actually seen the actual placement in the body?

He briefly thought about the best location to put his first cut and slightly drew the blade over the pale skin as if to mark the path he was going to take. He felt, rather than saw, Nadia nod, and returned to the beginning of his line, this time pushing down harder on the knife.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erik still isn't mine

Another Sunday, the house empty of servants, and Erik had just decided that it was time for him to inspect those unused upstairs rooms that Nadia had told him were only used by her father and brother, but not her. The doors were locked. He didn’t know if she would let him have the keys if he asked, but he didn’t need to ask. Those locks would be easy enough to pick. His hands were as nimble as ever. He itched to try them out on a piano.

She hadn’t exactly told him not to go in there, had she?

Actually, as far as he remembered, she had announced that she would use the time his hands took to heal to decide just how badly she wanted him to keep out of the locked rooms.

It was high time he found out what her decision had been.

He collected what tools he expected to need and was about to turn towards the door when he spotted Nadia through a window.

Dressed in plain men’s clothes, she spun through the garden as if dancing an elaborate dance without a partner. Metal glinted in her hand. It was quite obvious that she was not handling an edged weapon for the first time in her life, and just as obvious that she was missing an appropriate sparring partner.

Following a spur of the moment idea, he tossed his improvised lockpicks back into the drawer that had in the meantime become crowded with a large number of small objects that he had picked up here and there.

He discarded his vest and went downstairs in shirtsleeves.

If Nadia noticed his arrival, she didn’t show it. Instead she smoothly went from one pattern to the next without as much as pausing.

The case she had apparently taken the saber from lay on the low wall that surrounded the kitchen garden. It looked easily large enough to be one of those dueling cases that held two weapons of the same kind.

Sure enough.

Eric hefted the weapon and weighed it in his hand. It felt good. Somewhat heavier than the blades he usually carried for defense, but well balanced.

The saber held in a relaxed grip by his side, he returned to where Nadia was still going through her patterns. He stood aside, not wanting to interrupt the flow, and waited for the opportune moment.

When it came, he stepped forward, saber raised, meeting her blade half way.

She smoothly reversed her movement. While she clearly stepped out of her pattern, it wasn’t done in a jarring way. She shifted out of one and into another, coming back at him.

At him, not his blade, which told him that she had fenced with living partners before. Where did a woman learn to use a weapon like that?

He parried, spinning aside to lunge in from her right.

She evaded and countered with a sideways cut at his middle.

Erik had never had any formal fencing lessons, though the need to defend himself had been a good incentive. Like everything he put his mind to, he did it well.

It was clear that the woman had been taught properly, but she lacked the life-or-death feeling that sent adrenalin coursing through Erik’s body in spite of knowing they weren’t fighting for real. It made them rather well matched.

Blades clashed, hilts bound.

“I’m impressed,” Erik said with a grin.

Nadia jerked her saber free, turning so his subsequent swing would not graze her. “I spent most of my childhood and youth travelling with the army,” she pointed out, panting slightly. “It would have been stranger if I’d not picked up anything.”

Sidestepping her next attack, he tried to sneak his blade inside of her range. “I’m surprised they let you try,” he admitted as metal rang on metal again. “A girl…”

Nadia’s features froze in a snarl as she whirled, first away from him, then towards him, silvery steel a blur through the air that suddenly stopped.

Erik stood rooted in place. He felt the cool touch against his neck as he swallowed.

“I yield,” he offered, still surprised at that last move.

The pressure increased for a fraction of a second, then it was gone. She walked over to where she had left the case and put away her sabre.

He followed, unsure if he had said anything to make her mad.

Before he could try to say anything, she spoke again.

“They were supposed to teach my brother, of course. I was hard to keep away, and they figured out quickly that it was easier to teach both of us instead of only one. They thought I’d tire of it soon enough.”

“I can see that you didn’t,” Erik responded. “Didn’t your father mind?”

Nadia held out the case for him to return his weapon as well. “Our father was happy as long as I showed up on time for my instruction with him. Otherwise, he pretty much left me to my own devices if I didn’t get into trouble. Thank you for that match, by the way. It’s been over a year since I last had that opportunity.”

He gently put down the blade and snapped the bracket that held it into place. “Since your brother left here?” he asked.

Her brow furrowed into a frown. “My brother? No. He’s wonderful for drilling someone new to fencing, but he’d be entirely lost with the kind of fancy blade work we did back there.”

Noticing his confused expression, she went on. “Our mother died giving birth to my brother. It was a difficult birth, and very long. That kind of thing rarely leaves the child untouched. My brother isn’t exactly what you’d call stupid, but his world is very straightforward. He would have made a great soldier, but a horrible officer. Since he’s born too highly to do that, he ended up travelling with us after all. One thing he is good at is finding things to make himself useful, though.”

“Do you miss them?” he said before he realized it was probably a stupid thing to ask.

She looked at him in a peculiar way that he couldn’t quite place.

“Not as much recently.”

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	17. Chapter 17

Music drew him downstairs.

It was the kind of music that comes from music boxes that have to be wound up and that will play only one and the same piece, over and over and over again, but it was music nevertheless.

It was the first piece of music he had heard since he had come to Nadia's place. It violently drove home how sorely he missed it.

Nadia was in the parlor, listening to the sounds coming from the device.

The sight of her took Erik aback. For the first time since he had known her, she was dressed entirely feminine, in a blue dress that made the auburn of her hair shine. Hair that was much longer than he had ever realized, now that for once it was not tied back and braided tightly, but cascaded openly over her shoulders in gentle waves, with only one thin strand on either side of her head bound back to keep them out of her face. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Erik,” she said. “Would you like to dance?”

He stopped where he stood, shaking his head.

As he saw what could only be disappointment in her face, he hurried to say: “I don’t know how.”

“You knew well enough this morning,” she pointed out.

“That was fencing, not dancing,” he objected.

She shrugged. “Same principle. Would you be interested in learning, by any chance?”

He mirrored her gesture. He didn’t think he would ever be able to use that particular skill, but it wasn’t like he had anything better to do just then. He came closer. “What do I do?”

Nadia stopped the music. “Imagine you’re moving in a square.” She indicated the floor. “Like this.” She showed him the steps a bit more slowly than the actual dance would be, hitching up the skirt of her dress enough to let him see where she was putting her feet. “This is the man’s part. The woman starts moving back as the man moves forward.”

Erik repeated the steps. It seemed simple enough so far. Nadia started to count time, but quickly stopped when she realized that he had slipped into the rhythm easily.

“Very good.” She stood facing him and held our her hand. “Your left arm should be like this.”

Obediently, he took the desired position. A moment later, the woman placed her hand on top of his. He nearly jerked away in surprise.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Fine then.” She left her hand precisely where she had put it, resting in his without exerting any pressure. “Your other hand goes around to the back of my shoulder.”

Instead of obliging again, he stared at her. That sounded like she wanted him to touch her.

Since she seemed to be waiting for something, he reached out to hold his hand behind her back without actually making contact.

“I need to be able to feel your hands to tell where you want to go,” Nadia told him as she gently rested her left hand on his upper arm, close to the shoulder.

The room was getting unexpectedly hot.

After another moment’s hesitation, he shifted his hand into a feather-light touch.

“I’m not going to bite you,” Nadia told him. “Come on, there’s no one here to complain that it’s improper to touch an unmarried woman.”

That was not what had been on his mind.

He adjusted a little.  This time, she seemed to be satisfied at least.

“Now you do just what you did before, except that we’re going to move together,” she announced.

He stepped forward. Nadia moved with him. He stepped to the side and she matched his movement. Judging from the expression on her face, she didn’t seem to think this to be too horrible an ordeal.

Music started to play – not in the parlor but solely inside his head, molding itself to their motions.

“Let’s wind up the music box again and try this to the music,” Nadia suggested after a short while, interrupting his mental tune.

“Alright.” He removed his hands from her and waited as she wound up the device.

He remembered where to put his hands, though he had to fight the strange feeling of having only a thin layer of delicate fabric between his hand and a female body that was not cringing from his touch.

The music helped. The moment the first notes sounded, his feet were moving almost as if from their own accord.

For the duration of the dance, Erik let himself get lost in the music. It conjured up images of what might have been if he had been a man like any other. For a few precious minutes, his mind was dancing to the orchestra of a grand ball, guiding a woman across the dance floor who looked up at him appreciatively, like any other young man enjoying a ball with his girl…

Even though he would never see the inside of any such event, it was nice to pretend for a little while.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	18. Chapter 18

For several hours, Erik had been immersed in his drafts. Now, finally sufficiently satisfied with the result, he leaned back and carefully worked the knots out of muscles stuck in one position for too long to take it without complaint.

Nadia, who had pulled an armchair into a corner to read without disturbing his concentration, looked up.

“All done?” she asked.

He chuckled. “For now,” he said. “Do you want to see?”

She got to her feet and came over to stand behind his chair and look at his proposition for adjustments to the house over his shoulder.

“What’s this for?” she wanted to know as she leaned forward to point at the feature she meant, brushing against his cheek as she did so.

He jerked aside at the touch, and she at his reaction.

“I’m sorry.” There was an odd note to her voice. He looked around to study her face, but couldn’t quite place the expression either.

“I didn’t know that you found my proximity so repulsive.”

 _He_ find _her_ repulsive? Among the two of them, he was the monster who shouldn't have exposed anyone to the looks of his face, let alone physical contact.

"I don't!" he hurried to assure her, then realized that, as emphatically as he had said it, it could be easily misunderstood as meaning something more. "I mean – it's me, not you. Repulsive, I mean. I—" He stopped himself and tried starting over. "I know you're good at pretending that I don't have a skull for a face, but I am not."

Now her expression was even more unreadable as she studied him – his face. The open scrutiny made him cringe inside.

"Have you looked in a mirror recently?" she asked.

"I am not on speaking terms with mirrors," Erik pointed out. "They do not like me, and I do not enjoy what they show me. The only use I have for them is in building show tricks, torture chambers and hiding secret passages."

Nadia watched him like she might a particularly interesting specimen now. He didn't particularly like it.

"Come along," she said with a sideways movement of her head to indicate direction. "It's past time for you to see something."

He would have liked to refuse, but he never had been able to do that when Nadia had come to the conclusion that he needed to do or see something.

Dragging his feet a little, he followed her, every inch of his posture making clear that he would have rather done something else.

The parlor was equipped with a man-high mirror that he had always carefully averted his gaze from when he passed it. He knew what he looked like and really didn't need the reminder.

Now, it seemed, he would not be given a choice, as Nadia apparently intended to position him right in front of it.

He glanced at the grotesque creature staring out at him and away again quickly, then froze and raised his eyes to the mirror again more slowly.

Several months of good, regular meals had put a little padding on his frame. While still lean, he was no longer as skinny as he used to be. The skull-like features of his face had softened somewhat in the same process. The skin wasn't stretched as tightly over the bone anymore. Exposure to sun and air had improved its color, which, while still lighter than average, was no longer as ghastly pale. The veins previously visible as blue lines under near-translucent skin had become less obvious and all but disappeared in some places.

His face would never be handsome or even bordering ordinary. The hole at its center where a nose was supposed to be made sure of that. However, while still ugly, with misshapen lips and unevenly sized eyes – the latter also less noticeable than before, though still quite clear to him –, it was clearly a human face, rather than looking like something that should have been buried for a week.

It wasn't the kind of face that would give children nightmares anymore.

Well, at least not very bad nightmares.

Lucky thing that he didn't need to exhibit himself these days. No one would pay to see _that_.

He started to realize the implications of that thought and turned to Nadia. "I need time to think."

Stepping aside with a nod to give him space, she made clear that she wasn't going to push him into anything else for the time being. "Let me know when you're ready to go through those plans with me," she told him.

That was something only Nadia would do – drop some major revelation at him and then go back to day-to-day business as if nothing had happened or changed.

Then again, maybe nothing had happened or changed for her.

He went upstairs to get his mask. He wasn't ready to show his face in public, no matter how much it had changed, and he needed to be out for a while to contemplate his current options.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	19. Chapter 19

He had needed work to occupy his body while his mind was busy dealing with his new insights. Right now, that work had to be away from Nadia's house.

Following an idea he had had weeks ago, he had gone to Maria's home to volunteer to fix that chimney. The old man there – home alone with the youngest children at this time of the day – had put up a token resistance initially, but given in soon enough. It did need fixing badly, Grandfather was no longer physically able to do it, and none of the family's women knew how.

Erik worked quickly but thoroughly, enjoying the physical exhaustion that came with a job well done and signifying an accomplished task.

Riding back slowly, he let his horse amble along and pick her own path through the dirty streets.

He had reached the fringes of the poor quarter, when he spotted a boy running down the street, apparently aiming right for him. He reined in his mare. While he had no idea what anyone might want for him and doubted that he was actually the target of that boy's desire – considering the headlong dash, he hardly would have been aiming at stealing anything –, he didn't need her to spook if the stranger got up to some mischief as he passed them.

The boy skidded to a halt just next to Erik's stirrup and looked up at him. His face bore the telltale marks of the disease Nadia had told him about.

Erik waited, not initiating conversation, but not riding away either.

After a moment to catch his breath, the boy spoke. His enunciation was somewhat slurred, but understandable easily enough.

"Are you the man who leaves things outside our place?"

Erik nodded. Why deny it? Ever since his first meeting with Isa, he had made a point of leaving small bundles of blankets, clothing, food and, sometimes, a handful of coins, just inside the passage through that wall. He had never spotted the girl again –  or any of the other children who were living there, really – and he had not tried to force the matter. Not wanting to be seen was something that he could understand only too well.

"Can you come?" the boy asked. "Isa wants to see you."

Did that mean they'd actually been keeping a lookout for him? Erik wheeled his horse towards the derelict building the children had taken shelter in. "Why didn't she come for me on her own?" he asked. "She had no trouble approaching me to steal from me before."

His mare walked forward at a slight shift of his weight, slowly enough to permit the boy to keep up with him easily.

"Guy caught her trying to nick somethin' of his a few days ago," the boy explained. "They beat her up bad. She wants to see you."

They probably knew that he was associated with Nadia. As she had told him, it took a lot of convincing to get these children to accept any help from her. They were too afraid to pass on their disease. He wasn't going to make her work any harder by refusing now, even though he could imagine plenty of things he would have rather done. Leaving them supplies was one thing. Going in to face that girl again was an entirely different one.

The boy seemed to feel similarly about the matter. The way he hung back, following but not exactly walking alongside and keeping a watchful eye on Erik's every move suggested that he wasn't all that happy about the prospect of a visitor, albeit an invited one, to their hideout.

 Steeling himself for what he knew he would have to face inside, he got off of his horse at their destination and left her standing where she was, relying on her to know better than let herself be stolen.

He ducked through the opening in the wall before he could reconsider.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness inside as quickly as they always did.

There were several children in there, as well as a larger person.

The hum of conversation in the room quieted when he straightened.

"I got him," the boy announced unnecessarily.

All eyes rested on Erik as he approached that corner in which he knew Isa had her bed.

He ignored the whispers that followed him and knelt by the side of the scant straw padding on which Isa lay wrapped in his old cloak. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow.

"I'm here, Isa," he said. He noticed that she was paler than she had been, with dark smudges under the eye on the good side of her face.

The girl stirred, blinked at him and muttered something Erik couldn't quite make out. When he didn't react, she reached up weakly with one hand as if to remove his mask.

Forcing his hand to be steady, he complied after several moments of hesitation.

He felt all eyes resting on him. It was getting harder by the second to not slap on the mask again and draw a knife on them.

Finally, the oldest one of them spoke, addressing Isa. "He's not like us." The young man's words were surprisingly well articulated. Erik glanced at him. He bore similar marks to those of the others, but his were mild by comparison. He remembered what Nadia had said.

"No," he confirmed, knowing that the silence that followed had to be filled somehow. "I was born this way."

He shoved the mask into a pocket – putting it back on now would have been ridiculous.

"Do you need anything?" Erik asked, his eyes shifting from Isa to the children's leader and back.

The boy shrugged. "Unless you can work miracles, I don't think there's anything anyone can do."

That set off a new burst of conversation in the background. Erik was getting better at discerning words in the slurred speech. He could hear several of the others debating how they would split up Isa's  things among themselves once she died.

He turned his attention towards Isa. "May I have a look at what they did to you?"

The girl nodded, releasing her hold on the cloak to let him pull it aside.

She was wearing an oversized shirt beneath.

"Do you need some light?" the older boy asked when he reached out to pull aside the fabric to gauge the extent of her injuries.

Erik shook his head. "My eyes adjust well to the dark. I can see plenty by now." He could certainly see the dark stain of bruising spreading on Isa's stomach that spoke of internal bleeding.

She saw confirmation of what she already knew in his eyes when he looked back at her face after covering her again.

"I'm not afraid to die." Her voice was weak, but at least he could understand what she was saying now. "I'm just afraid to die alone."

"She says—," the older boy started translating, but Erik cut him off.

"I understood what she said," he told him. Just about to respond by telling her that she wasn't going to be alone, that all her friends were there around her, he realized his mistake.

The "friends" around her were already dividing her meager belongings among themselves. In a worst-case scenario, they wouldn't even wait until she died.

"You won't," he promised her. "I can't work miracles, but I can make sure that you won't be alone."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	20. Chapter 20

When Nadia opened the door upon Erik's knock, the expression in his eyes made clear at once that once that asking questions was not the thing to do now.

She stepped aside and let him in, glancing at the child he was carrying.

He answered the question in her eyes before she could speak.

"I need a room for Isa."

He was relieved when she didn't challenge the statement. She merely turned and walked ahead of him down the hallway leading away from the salon, to where she had three rooms that were set up to accommodate either a servant staying the night or a patient who needed supervision.

She pushed open the door and hurried to the bed to pull aside the blanket so he could put the girl down.

Nadia's face was serious when she took in the girl's condition. Isa was hardly conscious by this point.

"Let's get her cleaned up and see what we can do," she decided, reaching out to stroke a lock of hair from Isa's face.

"She's in pain," Erik pointed out. "Can you do something about that first?"

The woman nodded. "Just give me a second. Do you know what happened to her?"

"Roughly," Erik replied. "The short version of it is, she was caught stealing and someone tried to teach her a lesson. I don't know who it was." He paused for a moment. "Which is lucky for that person."

The sound Nadia made in response sounded almost like a growl. It took Erik a moment to realize that it was directed at the person who had beaten the child, and not at him.

Erik pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat in it as Nadia went to gather what she needed. He didn't want risk Isa waking up and finding herself alone in a strange room, even though he was quite aware that she might, in fact, never wake up again at all.

He remembered the other child that he had watched die a few years ago. The Daroga's son had been killed by his hand, his poison, to spare him the slow, agonizing death of suffocation as his body failed him. He had known the death rites required by the boy's religion, started to read out the passages appropriate for the situation before the Daroga had come to join him after all and taken over.

He had no idea what Isa would have wanted or expected – or hoped for. She had probably been raised as a catholic. Should he have sent for a priest?

Would any of them even be willing to come to this place, or to go near any of those children?

Nadia returned, apparently trying to carry in everything she might be needing at once.

Erik jumped to his feet and rushed to the door to take some of the objects from her before anything got dropped or too much water spilled.

She gave him a brief, thankful smile before she turned towards the child.

"How did you find her?" she wanted to know as she set to work.

Standing on the other side of the bed, he tried to be helpful without ending up being in the way. "One of the other children found me and took me to her," he explained. "She was afraid – they were already trying to divide her things among them."

"So you decided to kidnap her?" her voice held no reproach.

He shook his head. "She asked me not to leave her on her own. I couldn't very well stay there for … however long it takes." He switched to French for the last words. The girl may have been far gone at this point, but there was no telling how much she might be able to take in of the things he said. Even though he knew that she was aware of her condition already, he refused to let her hear it again from his lips.

Nadia carefully probed the girl's injuries, drawing a painful sound from her.

She reached out to stroke the undamaged part of Isa's face with the back of her hand. "I'm sorry, little one. I won't do it again."

"Can't you give her something?" Erik asked, indicating the case of the kind that she had brought back when she had worked on weaning him off the morphine among the stock of things that she had carried in. He still used his native tongue. "I know you'd usually need her degree of pain to tell the severity of her injury, but I don't think it matters anymore in this case."

With one last, long look at the still-worsening bruises, the woman snapped open the case and held it out to him.

"You know how to do it," she told him.

Forcing his hand to be steady, he reached out for the syringe and the vial to fill it from. He realized that she was giving him the choice of ending the girl's life or merely taking away her pain and letting things run their course, however long it took.

He wouldn't take another life except in self-defense.

Or maybe on request.

Except for the lives of those beasts who were Isa's murderers, if he ever found out who they were. He was definitely ready to make an exception for those.

Carefully, he did some calculations in his head to figure out how much would be enough without ending up too much. He felt Nadia's eyes on him, not judging but maybe curious about what he would choose.

Without looking back at her, he reached for Isa's arm, trying to stay away from the violent bruises that marked the tracks of strong hands gripping and holding her. Swelling at the joints suggested someone had twisted her arm around to pin her in place.

It was hard to prevent fury from showing on his face, but he certainly did not wish Isa to see and misunderstand it as being directed at her.

Masks definitely had the benefit of hiding his facial expression, making his mood harder to gauge for anyone else.

His lips twitched as he realized his mask was still in his pocket, forgotten in his hurry to take the girl to safety. He had ridden all the way back with his face exposed and never once cared about people seeing him.

As he put aside the empty syringe, his other hand covered Isa's for a moment reassuringly. For a fleeting moment, it crossed his mind that he had just been given morphine to handle and it had never occurred to him that he could use it on himself. Now that the thought was there, though, he couldn't unthink it. That box would be so easy to just slip into his pocket.

He was distracted again when the girl's hand turned, closing weakly around his fingers.

Uncertain of what to do, he returned a slight squeeze, ready to pull back any moment if she opened her eyes and saw just whose hand she was holding.

"You're safe with us," he told her, his voice hardly more than a whisper, but putting into it all the conviction that he could. He couldn't let her be afraid of anything in the little time that remained to her.

Her grip on his hand tightened for a moment, then loosened.

Alarmed, he looked from her hand to her face, afraid of what he would see there.

"She's only sleeping," Nadia told him as she noticed. "Can't promise she'll wake up again, though."

Erik nodded. "I know."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	21. Chapter 21

Washed and cleaned up, the girl's formerly dirt-encrusted hair was a thick, curly black, her undamaged skin a complexion that suggested that she may have had gypsy ancestors rather than being Italian born.

Erik pulled a chair to the side of her bed and sat there, unwilling to leave even for a few moments.

Nadia did not try to persuade him otherwise, but watched him keep watch over the girl like a father might – or, taking their ages into consideration, an older brother. A silent smile crept onto her face. He'd probably make a good father indeed if he could apply the same devotion in other situations as well.

When Isa's eyes fluttered open again, Erik was at hand to assure her that she was not alone. While her speech was too slurred for Nadia to understand, the man apparently was quite capable of deciphering what the girl said.

With one strong arm behind her shoulders, he helped Isa into a half-sitting position

He reached for a glass placed readily at hand on the bedside table. It held water with honey, prepared just in case she did wake up again.

Since the damage to her mouth would have made it impossible for her to drink from it without spilling most of it on herself, he did not even try to hold the glass up to the lips, but instead slowly, carefully, offered it is spoon by spoon. It was slow work, but he did with the patience the Nadia could only admire.

The girl slumped against his chest when they were done, and Erik put aside the water, letting her lie there while holding her close with the arm that still supported her. Her eyes drifted shut again and every once in awhile they jerked open, as if she was trying very hard not to fall asleep again.

After a few moments, Erik began to hum a low tune  Nadia had never heard before. If she had had to guess, she would have assumed that it was a lullaby. She did not miss Isa's reaction, however. The girl straightened up a little and turned her head to look at Erik.

Satisfied at the reaction, he went from humming to singing, his voice still low but of a rich quality that spoke of long training and great mastership of music. Like the tune, the language in which he sang was unknown to Nadia. She assumed that it might have been Romance, going by the sounds of it and judging from the girls gypsy appearance. Erik, of course, would speak the language and be familiar with the songs of at least the tribe that he had travelled with.

Isa closed her eyes again, letting her body rest against Erik's, as she slowly slipped back into an drowsy half-sleep.

Erik never seemed to notice it. He continued his song, his eyes intent on the child's face as her features relaxed and her breathing slowed.

He let the last note run out and sat in silence for a second before gently lowering the little body back into the cushions and straightening. He didn't look at Nadia, but she could see his shoulders moving in the tell-tale fashion of grief.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No one you recognise belongs to me.

Something had changed between the two of them after Isa's death. The unquestioning way in which Nadia had simply provided what the girl needed, never asking questions about the why, about bills not going to be paid, or the risk of losing paying customers if they knew what kind of patient she had in the house for the short time that Isa had lived, had stirred something unfamiliar within Erik.

If he had been forced to name it, he might have called it a sense of trust.

That didn't fit in with how he saw himself all. He didn't trust anyone.

He tried to keep his distance. For a very short time, he considered – once again – finding a different place to live. However, any such considerations were cut short by the fact that he did not really wish to go anywhere else permanently at this time. Much as he wanted to deny it, he had come to like his hostess more than he dared admit to himself.

Of course he would never have told her about it or let it on in any other way.

More and more often, however, he caught himself imagining how things could have been different if he had been just a normal person. No matter how much Nadia treated him like one, he could never forget that it was one thing he was not.

But if he had been…

 

 

Erik was out buying some supplies that he needed for his work on the building, or so he had said.

He was working true wonders on the old stone, bringing it back to life in ways that only a true artist could. Nadia would have spent hours just watching designs form under his hands as he worked the stone if she hadn't had any work of her own to do.

She looked up from the papers she had been sorting on her desk when Lorenzo entered the door.

"There's a man by the door," he said. "He says he's not in need of medical attention, but he wants to talk to you."

Nadia got up and followed the boy through the hallway. "Did you give you a name?" She asked.

A shake of his head was the first answer she got. Then he apparently remembered his manners, and added: "He only said he wanted to talk to the master of this house about the stonework on the first floor."

This stonework?

What in the world with some stranger have to talk to her about regarding the stonework Erik had done?

Was he looking to hire someone to work for him?

If so, she would have to pass on the message to Erik and hope that he was not going to either decline for fear of being seen by people, or accept and never be seen again by her.

The man looked to be well into his sixties. Considering that his face was deeply marked by lines of pain, he may have been somewhat younger than his looks, though.

"My apprentice is telling me that you want to speak to me, Signor?" Nadia said when he looked at her.

If he was surprised to see a woman be the master of the house, he concealed well.

The man nodded. "My name is Giovanni," he told her before he was interrupted by an unhealthy-sounding cough.

Nadia looked at him with some concern. "Are you certain that you are not here to seek medical advice?" She wanted to know as she approached him.

Giovanni shook his head. "I know what my ailment is," he told her, "and I know that I have few years left to live." He lifted his hands, marked by arthritis, and gave her a tired smile. "It's one of the prices people of my trade pay: a body ruined from hard work and early death from lungs eaten up by the stone dust we breathe in day in, day out at work."

There was little she could say to that. She beckoned him into the library and offered him a seat by the table. The man thankfully accepted.

"In case my apprentice has not told you, you can call me Nadia," she told him. "Now, what was that about the upstairs stonework?"

The man sighed. "Several years ago," he began, "I had an apprentice. He did beautiful work. The stone liked him, he was able to work it like few others – and certainly not at his age. He was a fast learner and would have made great master one day. Unfortunately, things happened differently. There was a horrible accident that he blamed himself for and left in the dead of the night. That day, I didn't have the strength or the sense to hold him back. I thought I'd never see him again, and that he would either take up his life of travelling again, probably never to return to this area, or come to an early end, by his hand or another's. Even then, my health would not have allowed me to travel to go looking for him."

He paused, looking around the room with a somewhat lost look on his face, eventually fastening his eyes onto one of the small designs that Erik had drawn as proposals and left for Nadia to study and choose from.

Nadia waited, sensing that he had not come to the end yet, but letting him continue at his own pace. This was obviously not easy for him, and not only for reasons of his health.

"I don't get out much any more," he went on eventually, "but sometimes, when the weather is good for a few days, I will take a short walk. The air and the sun feel good."

He apparently noticed that he was digressing, for he seemed to physically jerk himself out of his line of thought and back into his original flow.

"At first, I didn't believe my eyes when I saw the pattern by your upstairs windows." He looked upwards, as if you could see them from here. "It looked like his work." He pointed at the design. "This looks like his work."

Nadia put her finger just over the plain signature that Erik placed in the lower right corner of all of his finished drawings.

"Is he… Does he hide his face?" Giovanni wanted to know.

Nadia's lips twitched. "Not any more," she said. "At least I haven't seen him masked for a while."

"Do you know where I can meet him?" Giovanni went on. A new light had come into his eyes. The prospect of meeting his former apprentice again apparently was stronger than any illness or discomfort could be.

She looked out the window for a second, trying to come to a decision quickly. "He'll be back sometime before dinner, most likely. If you wish, you can wait for him here. I can have someone bring you tea to shorten your wait."

"That is a very generous offer," the old stonemason told her. "I don't want to impose…"

Nadia had already gotten to her feet. "Nonsense. You're not imposing. I wouldn't have offered if I hadn't meant it. I just get comfortable here, and I'll be back with a tray in a second."

 

She heard the entrance door open and close again when she came back from the kitchen, carrying a tray holding a steaming mug, some sugar and honey. She stopped, waiting for Erik to cross the salon.

"I ordered the delivery made to this address," Erik told her. "I hope you don't mind, but it was easier than having to organize picking everything up when it arrives."

"It's fine," she assured him. "You have a visitor, you know. He's waiting in the library." She observed his face precisely. The news obviously surprised him.

"A visitor? Why would I have a visitor? I know no one who would be interested in visiting me." He seemed genuinely confused. "Are sure he meant me?"

Nadia nodded. "Oh yes, I'm sure. He recognized your masonry. Go right in," she suggested with a motion of her head in the direction of the library door. "I was just bringing him tea to pass the time until your return."

Erik's eyes dashed to the stairs and back to the library door. "I should at least get a mask first," he told her uncertainly. "He probably doesn't know that it was done by a circus freak."

"You are not a circus freak, Erik, and you know it." Nadia chided. "Now go ahead. He's waiting for you."

After another moment's hesitation, Erik actually walked over to the door and pushed it open enough to look inside. For a moment, his eyes met Giovanni's. Almost instantly, he whirled and stared at Nadia with stark fear in his eyes.

"I can't do this." He looked like a cornered animal now. "It's… I just can't!"

He pushed past her and hurried through the salon and out the front door again, letting it fall shut behind him.

Nadia went in and put the tray down on the table.

Giovanni was just getting up from his seat. "I apologize," he said. "I should not have come here. Apparently he has not forgiven me yet for not standing up more actively for him back then, or maybe for not holding him back. I will not take up any more of your precious time, Signorina."

With one hand on his arm, she held him back. "Don't." She gently pushed him back. "Have the tea. Take your time, look at the drawings if you like. I think I know where he went. I'll go after him and see if he can be persuaded to return after all."

 

Erik was sitting in the grass in a quiet corner of the garden that he had recently started to retreat to when he needed to think. He was trembling. He had not thought that he would ever see Giovanni again. Why, oh why had he not thought of this happening when he had decided to linger in the area of Rome?

What had he come here for?

Was it going to charge him with murder of his daughter after all these years? He surely would have deserved it.

How could he go back in there, when by now Giovanni had certainly told Nadia of how the horror of his face had in the past caused the death of an innocent girl?

And innocent she had been.

Annoying, yes, but nevertheless innocent. Her limited experience had not prepared her for what she saw when Giovanni told him to take off his mask that night.

Soft steps in the grass tore him out of his reverie. He looked up and his face hardened when he saw Nadia approach.

Without saying a word, she sat down beside him and waited.

He wasn't planning on saying anything, and surprised himself by speaking anyway.

"Has he told you what I did?"

"He told me that you were the best apprentice he ever had," Nadia said. "He told me that he recognized your work on my house and that he wanted to see you again. He told me that he regretted not keeping your back that night."

Her voice was calm but it did nothing to soothe the emotions roiling inside him. His voice was harsh when he answered, bordering on rude.  "Did he also tell you that I killed his daughter?"

"According to him, it was an accident." She said, assuming that they were both referring to the same situation. "A horrible accident is what he said."

Erik gave a mirthless laugh. He didn't meet Nadia's eyes. "The girl had wanted to look behind my mask for days. At some point Giovanni told me that I had to let her. We were standing on a balcony. The railing was old." Tears filled his eyes and he wiped them away angrily. "I had been planning on fixing it, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet. I would have done it the next day, or maybe the day after that. There was so much work to do. I never thought that someone would stumble against it with such force." He gave up on trying to stem the silent flow. "When she saw me, she backed away. She was screaming and moving back, back, back… And then she fell. Giovanni ran to her – I don't know if he thought she might have survived it, but I knew that I no longer haD any place in that household. Who would expect him to share his roof with the murderer of his daughter?"

Reaching out for him, Nadia put her hand on his arm, giving it a little squeeze.

"As he said: it was an accident. No one could have foreseen that. He does not blame you, and neither should you. He wants to talk to you – it's really important to him."

"I don't see how I can face him," Erik said dejectedly, "not after what I've done."

Nadia's hand moved up until it rested on his shoulder. Much as he hated to admit it, the touch did offer some comfort.

"You did nothing wrong."

He shook his head mutely.

She closed her eyes for a second. "He says that he is sick and has only little time left to live. Would you deny a dying man's wish?"

Erik's lips twitched. It was clear to him that she wasn't going to leave him alone until he agreed. He shook off her hand and climbed to his feet.

"Then let's get it over with quickly."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	23. Chapter 23

They returned together, Nadia a stalwart presence at his back.

He hated himself for taking comfort in knowing she was close at that moment. She was the one who was dragging him back, if not literally then by knowing just what to say to get him to consent to doing things against his better judgment.

Giovanni had risen to his feet and was waiting for him by the entrance to the library.

Before Erik could say a word, he found himself pulled into a tight embrace.

He stood there frozen, shocked both by the action itself and by how fragile the older man felt.

Giovanni stepped back away from him after a moment to look him over. "You look good, Erik," he observed.

"I never look good," Erik returned with a shake of his head. "Signor, I… I am surprised that it appears you have not come to avenge your daughter's death."

"Avenge?" the old man looked genuinely confounded. "Erik, there is nothing to avenge. My daughter died in an accident – an accident that might not have happened if I had made a wiser decision that day. But I lost two children that day, and I have only myself to blame for losing my son. I…"

"You had no son." Erik was genuinely confused now.

The corner of Giovanni's mouth twitched. "I was… thinking of you as my son, Erik," he confessed. "The longer you stayed, the more… I forgot that you hadn't always been there. You were the son I always wished I had, and when the rumors sprang up that you were my boy, born out of wedlock, that you were wearing the mask to conceal that your features resembled mine, I didn't mind them. I was happy to let people think such a thing. I wished it were true."

He took a shuddering breath, clearly fighting down a cough, then went on: "I should have gone after you that night, Erik. I should have brought you back. I wished I had – I wished it so many times. All those nightmares of the things that might have befallen you, fearing you'd been left dead or dying by the side of the road, suffering or worse for my mistakes, even as I hoped that you could find happiness elsewhere…"

"Stop." Erik interrupted him, his voice commanding. "Signor, nothing terrible 'befell' me after I left your home. I took up travelling again. I eventually spent some years in Persia. I worked for the Shah. I am a wealthy man now. I was able to put all that you had taught me to use. It all worked out for the best." He did not mention the dangers that he had faced and survived. Poison and ground glass in his drink, the subsequent illness that had almost killed him; the khanum's little trick with the slave girl; opium, hashish and morphine as a means to keep the horrors in his own mind at bay; his final flight from Persia – Giovanni needed to know none of that.

Giovanni, in whose home he had first known what happiness could be.

Oh, how he had wished that those men had been right in their assumptions. There had been nothing that he would have liked better than Giovanni for his father. He had dreamed that the father he had never known would have been like him…

The old stonemason coughed, his whole body shaking with the violence of it, and Erik quickly stepped forward and reached out to guide him back to a chair where he could sit down.

As the coughing fit subsided, Giovanni spoke again, his voice barely above a whisper now. "Erik – you are no longer my apprentice. From the work I have seen, you are more worthy of the title of master than I have ever been. Will you stop calling me 'signor'? Can you…" he hesitated, uncertain of whether what he was about to say was too much to ask for. "Can you spare me a little of your time now and then, and will you let me try to set things right? I … have dreamt that maybe someday I could get back my son for so long."

His eyes were brimming with unshed tears, and Erik found his own vision clouding for similar reasons as he listened to his old master.

"You never lost me," he whispered as, obeying a sudden courageous impulse, he leaned forward to wrap his arms around the old man gently, careful to give him every opportunity to draw away if his proximity was as unpleasant to him as it should have been. "What would you have me call you?"

"You could call me by my name," Giovanni suggested. "Though you could also…" he trailed off. "Erik, nothing would make me happier than being allowed to call you my son."

Erik pulled back slightly – just enough to get a clear view of the other man's face. "You may call me whatever you consider right," he offered.

Giovanni reached out, cupping Erik's uncovered face in both hands and leaned forward to breathe a fatherly kiss onto the younger man's forehead, like a father might with a much younger child.

Erik had frozen as if petrified by the action. Silent tears were glistening on his cheeks.

"Father…" his voice sounded choked as, for the first time to his knowledge, he said aloud what he had only called Giovanni in his thoughts before then.

For what felt like eternity, the two men remained as they were, Giovanni sitting bent forward in the chair and Erik kneeling on the floor in front of him.

It was Giovanni who broke the spell eventually. "Do you still play your music?" he asked.

"Not recently," Erik admitted. "It has been a while since I had access to a piano."

"You never told me you wanted a piano." That was Nadia's voice from the direction of the door. Erik had almost forgotten that the woman was still present. From the sudden surprised jerk that went through Giovanni's body, the old man had.

Erik half-turned. "I didn't" he claimed. "I mean, I do miss the music, but I could just have bought a violin. I never expected you to get a piano for me."

Nadia looked half-amused. "You also never got around to picking those locks upstairs, did you?"

He could feel Giovanni next to him tense at the mention of picking locks.

The woman must have noticed as well, since she continued while Erik was still turning back towards his old teacher: "I told him he could use any room he could get into one way or another. Seems like he's too well-behaved after all, though, and I'll have to unlock the door." She walked over to stand by Giovanni's side. "Do you feel up to a short walk up the stairs?" she asked him.

After a second's consideration, Giovanni nodded and pushed himself to his feet.

Erik didn't reach out to support him, but stayed close at hand as they climbed the flight of stairs behind Nadia.

She unlocked the door and threw it wide open, revealing what must have once been intended as a ballroom or something similar. There were doors leading off of it in the rear - but the thing that drew Erik's attention was the instrument that sat forgotten near one corner.

Drawn almost as if by magic, he walked over to it, running his hands over the smooth material, tracing the few scratches that it had acquired, and finally uncovered the keys.

"It probably needs tuning," Nadia cautioned.

Beside her, Giovanni chuckled – a breathless, low-pitched sound. "That's what I told him about mine, the day I first brought him to my home," he admitted.

"My father plays – I have no talent for music to speak of," Nadia explained, walking over to Erik. "I can get someone to tune it for you, though."

"No need," Erik answered as he brushed his fingertips over the keys almost reverently. "I can do it."

 

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	24. Chapter 24

As the weeks wore on, restlessness started to take hold of Erik. At first, he did not quite understand the feeling. In contrast to Nadia, who had apparently spent most of her life on the move, he had had spells of staying in one place for years at a time even. He had spent a year with Giovanni, and much longer than that in Persia.

Travelling, to him, had always been a necessity, something he needed to do in order to survive. He wouldn't have minded finding a place where he could settle in and stay, in safety and relative comfort, for as long as he liked.

He did not permit himself to think that he might have found such a place. He wasn't superstitious, but the thought seemed just a bit too monstrous to permit in his mind.

Maybe it was that having so many people in his life was taking its toll. Nadia's household considered him one of theirs, and had for a good long while, and now there was his old master, whom he affectionately called 'Father'. He could not fathom why Giovanni would desire that, why he had not had him dragged away in chains as a murderer the moment he had laid eyes on him again, but for once he was willing to accept the situation without understanding it. Understanding, he hoped, would come later. Maybe at some point, the old man would see fit to explain his reasoning.

For the time being, his failing health was good incentive for Erik to not dwell on the things that he thought should have been, and instead focus on what was. If he could make up the harm he had done to the man even to the smallest degree, then so he would.

Still, the feeling that he needed to be on the road kept nagging at him, driving him to stare at a road leading out of Rome for minutes at a time until he forced himself to turn away from it.

The solution, stunning as it may have been, came to him when he found Nadia in the library that night, studying the contents of a letter.

She looked up as he entered, and slightly waved the page she held. "My father writes," she announced, following up with a lengthy pause in which Erik had the time to settle at the table across from her.

When he had made himself comfortable, she pushed one page of the letter over to him. "It appears that something has gone amiss with the management of his property near Rouen," she summarized, following up on the letter with several sheets of calculations and settlements, some of which had been marked in a different hand to point out irregularities.

"He requests that you take a horse up there and take care of it, since you're that much closer," Erik summarized what he read. He did the math quickly. "Even with a pair of good horses you'll be on the road for a week, one way. Add to that any unexpected events and however long it will take you to take care of the business there, and you'll easily be gone for a month."

She nodded, apparently not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect. "I'm sure the people here can live without me for a month. They got along well enough on their own before I showed up after all." With a sigh, she reached for a piece of paper and started jotting down notes on things that needed to be organized before she could leave.

So she had already decided to go, had she?

"When will you depart?" he heard himself ask. When had he decided to say that? A most unfamiliar feeling started to take a hold of Erik. Could it be possible that he didn't want to be parted from her for that long? That was ridiculous! He wasn't in the habit of growing attached to someone like that!

It took him a moment to realize that she had answered his question and added one of her own as well.

Looking up from the table, he gestured apologetically at the calculations before him. "Sorry," he said. "I got distracted."

Her eyebrows rose up a fraction, but she said nothing about it. "I said, do you think Giovanni would be very angry at me if I asked you to come along?"

If she—why would she want to ask him to accompany her? She couldn't be that fond of his company, no matter the friendship that had grown between them in the meantime. Was she afraid he'd steal her property and make off with it if she left him alone for a few weeks?

Of course, a journey of that length would be dangerous. Having someone who could shoot along was a good idea. Maybe she'd want his mathematical skills as well, once they arrived. They were vastly superior to hers, as they had found out.

"I think he will understand," Erik offered cautiously, hoping she had not meant the offer as a joke. It would be good to hear French spoken all around him again, if only for a short time. No matter how many languages he acquired on his travels, he was and would always be in love with the one he had spoken first.

Then another fact finally made it through the windings of his brain and clicked into place. "I grew up near Rouen." He wasn't sure if he had told her that before. She rarely asked about his past, and he rarely offered any information unprompted, but sometimes little things prompted a comment that warranted further elaboration.

She looked up from her writing and met his eyes silently, waiting for him to go on.

"I think my mother may still be living there."

There. He had said it, and the moment that it was said, the pieces connected in his mind. He didn't know if he _wanted_ to go back to the area of Rouen, but he most certainly needed to. After he had found his father, even though it was merely a father by choice – which in his case may have been better anyway – it was time to at least see and learn what had become of his mother.

His hands had started to shake at the thought, and he forced them to still.

"I'll be packed and ready to leave."

 

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	25. Chapter 25

It had been a very long time since Erik had last travelled in company. It may have been the first time ever that he travelled in company of his own choosing. Of course he hadn't **had** to accompany the Daroga to Persia, but the journey was rather like a necessary prelude to the hopefully fascinating things that waited for him at the destination.

Once there, the times he had travelled from one location to the other had often seen him accompanied by others, but he had still been effectively travelling alone.

It was different this time.

He rode masked. Nadia hadn't commented on it. Briefly – very briefly – he had debated travelling with his face exposed, only to realise that that was not a prospect he found himself capable of facing. His features may no longer have been as corpse-like as they had once been, but they were still unusual enough to draw attention he did not desire. With a fancy mask to cover his face, he would easily pass as some travelling performer in professional attire. He might still draw curiosity that way, but not the more unpleasant kind of stares.

That was one reason, though not the predominant one – as he admitted to himself in the silence of his mind, even though he'd never do so where anyone else could hear.

The main aspect behind his decision to don a mask again for the trip was that his entire body had started shaking uncontrollably at the thought of riding back into France, possibly riding back into that little village near Rouen, unmasked.

Crossing the country at a quick pace, they both enjoyed the ride. Nadia, Erik noted, was as good a rider as her history of travelling had led him to expect. Of course he had seen her on a horse plenty of times before, but there was quite a difference between riding short distances in town and going on a long ride cross-country.

It was an enjoyable experience, her stallion and his mare matching each other's pace well. Where he was at first surprised at the short, acerbic comments she dropped about some of the travellers they passed on the road, he soon found himself laughing along with her and, eventually, even trying for a few of his own.

Their nights were spent in inns and lodging houses. Erik wouldn't have minded sleeping under the open sky, but he couldn't deny the superior comfort of those places, if well-chosen, either.

They had covered roughly half the distance when their journey suddenly took a more eventful turn.

It was a lonely stretch of road, and they had just been debating whether to stop and spend the night outdoors or to hurrying on in the falling dusk to reach the wayhouse they had planned to spend the night at. They had lost time that day, following a road that was in too bad a condition to let the horses pick up any speed.

Failing light now forced them to keep to a slower pace again, and as much as Nadia would surely have appreciated a hot meal, if they were on the road much longer, any meal served would be cold by the time they arrived anyway.

Just about to break the amicable silence that had fallen between them to say as much, Erik turned towards his companion.

A movement at the corner of his eye diverted his attention.

"Erik?" Nadia asked as he stared down the road without speaking.

"I thought I saw someone." He kept his voice low as he indicated the stretch before them with a jerk of his head. Their path was leading them through a forest, tall old trees pressing in on them on either side and taking away much of the little light the setting sun still provided.

"Shadows, probably," she suggested. "I'll be more than happy to get back out into the open – I've been starting at nothing for the last half hour."

He nodded slowly. It hadn't been much different for him. Still…

"I don't think it was just a shadow this time."

Her horse fidgeted as her hands tightened on the reins. Erik could only guess at what she was thinking now. He, in any case, would have liked to make a headlong dash for it and race his horse out of this forest at a full gallop. What kept him from it was the knowledge that the bad light and the bad road combined would surely see him tumble into the dirt with his horse, causing an even bigger delay and some bruises in the best case, and ending with a dead horse or a broken neck in the worst. 

They weren't caught entirely by surprise, but it didn't make a great deal of a difference.

Two darkly clad shapes on horses separated from the shadows, effectively blocking the road. The scant light glinted on the steel of pistols held confidently in their hands. Both were pointed unwaveringly at the two travellers.

With a resigned sigh, Erik brought his horse to a stop. This was a self-defence situation. He was allowed to kill them. As a matter of fact, it was not only a matter of defending himself – he was with a woman after all.

That thought almost caused him to chuckle.

Nadia was sitting her horse with all the confidence and arrogance of someone fully in control of the situation, showing not the slightest bit of fear. Like his own, her coat was arranged for easy access to her pistol. She might not have been able to shoot quite as well as she fenced, but he was certain that she was more than adequate for this situation.

One thing she certainly did not need was his protection.

"Well, well," the larger one of the two drawled, kneeing his horse two steps forward, one hand busy with his pistol and the other beckoning. "Have we caught ourselves a colleague?"

Erik made a face underneath his mask. The two highwaymen covered their faces as well, though their masks were strictly utilitarian in a plain black, rather than Erik's more elaborate show man's contraption.  

"Hardly," Erik replied in a bored tone.

Apparently unwilling to give up the advantage of remaining a frightening unknown to his victim, the other man gestured. "Off with it."

He glanced at Nadia, who merely shrugged.

Hardly believing he was doing this, he reached up with his right hand, keeping the left free to grab his pistol in that moment of surprise when they saw him.

It wasn’t what it could have been. His face had definitely lost a lot of its shocking effect over the past months. Sure, there was some surprise, but it was nowhere near what he would have needed to safely draw and shoot.

He stuffed the mask into his belt to avoid losing it. "Now you," he said, his face neutral and his voice calm.

Laughter sounded from behind the other man's mask. "Hardly." His voice grew hard as steel then, all amusement gone from it. "Your purses. Now. Toss them over."

They weren't carrying purses. Both of them had some coin in their pockets for spending along the road, but they had the major part of their funds safely wrapped and packed away where it would not be stolen easily and possibly even be missed during a superficial search.

He turned aside anyway, twisting to shield his hand with his body, as if needing to detangle his purse strings.

His fingers closed around the grip of his pistol, and he could only hope that Nadia would do the same on her side. He didn't have the time or the opportunity to check. All he could do was rely on her thoughts running similarly enough to his. If they didn't they would probably be dead in a minute.

"Don't take forever!" the highwayman snapped, and Erik jerked back around to face him, pistol out and cocked.

Without losing any time aiming, he shot, urging his horse forward the next moment to remove himself from the location he had stood in, just in case.

Two more shots rang out. Erik saw his target slump in the saddle, the pistol slipping from his grasp. His horse spun in place, not happy with the situation at all, but didn't seem inclined to run.

The other's mount was of a different temper. As its rider jerked and tore a the reins, it briefly rose on its hind legs, turned and bolted with the rider hanging on for dear life and trailing a spray of red droplets. As he had hoped, Nadia had thought along the same lines as he had.

But there had been that third shot, and it had not been aimed at him…

Filled with sudden horror, he wheeled his horse, relief swamping him as he saw that his companion was still sitting on her horse, and replaced just as quickly again as he took in the details.

She still held the reins in one hand, her fingers clenched tightly on the leather strap. Her right hand had somehow managed to hold on to the pistol, even though the arm seemed to dangle uselessly, the reason evidenced by a spreading stain on the fabric of her coat over that shoulder.

With a visible effort, she lifted the hand with her weapon and let it rest on the saddle in front of her.

"We need to find a place to spend the night," she ground out when she saw Erik looking at her. "Preferably before the shock wears off and the pain catches up with me for real."

 

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	26. Chapter 26

By the time they found a place where they could stop safely, Nadia was swaying in the saddle. Every step her horse took as it followed Erik's white mare sent a jolt of pain up her injured arm.

She dismounted, a wave of nausea rolling over her more jarringly than she had hoped when she hit the ground, and she grabbed the saddle with her good hand to keep from falling.

Erik was off of his horse in a second before he froze, uncertain of what to do next.

"Maybe I better ride on to the next town and find a surgeon," he suggested.

The woman shook her head. "You'll only kill your horse by that." She leaned against her stallion, cradling her injured arm with her other hand. Luckily the animal did not seem inclined to wander off.

He hesitated, torn between reaching out to help her and hesitating to force his touch on her. She hadn't minded before, but maybe it was different now that she wasn't as able to defend herself against him as usual if she felt the need to. "The bullet needs to come out as soon as possible," he observed, forcing his voice to remain calm.

"I know." He could almost hear her teeth grind against the pain.

"You can't do it yourself." An unnecessary observation, most likely. She would be aware of that as well as he was. He considered the implications of spending the night here by the side of the road and riding on tomorrow. Her arm would hardly improve by then, and most likely worsen. She probably wouldn’t get a lot of sleep during the night either. As much as he wanted to press on right now and find someone to help her, he was also glad that she objected to it. He didn't want to leave her alone like this. If it had been day, he might have tried to convince her to on with him. In a dark moon night like this, however, it would be folly to ride on with one of them not at her most alert.

He almost missed her next words over his contemplations.

"I know. But you can."

A shudder raced down his spine. He?

She unhooked her bag from the saddle. "You must have the skill. We have the tools. I'd rather you do it than some surgeon I don't know."

He understood the part that she left unsaid. Too many who styled themselves surgeons had little or no training, and less real knowledge of anatomy.

"We'll need light," he said. Most of all, he needed time to process the situation. Did she really trust him that much?

He busied himself unsaddling the horses and starting a fire while she found a place to sit.

All too soon, he ran out of things he could claim where necessary to do right away. There was nothing but to face the task at hand.

Erik wasn't squeamish in any way and had never minded the sight of blood. He probably would have done what was required of him now without a second thought, had the patient be anyone else.

This, however was different. Nadia wasn't just anyone. She was…

Forcing his mind not to think of who or what she was or was not, he knelt by her side and removed the knife from his belt to cut open her shirt. The wound was still oozing blood, the sight making it easy for him to ignore that fact that he was facing exposed parts of a female body that he had never thought to see in a living woman.

Her face was calm as they examined the damage in the flickering light of the fire together, though she bit her lip when he touched the area around the wound.

"Lucky," she told him before he could say anything. "I don't think it damaged the bone." As if to prove her words, she carefully moved her arm, renewing the flow of blood.

"Don't do that," he chided.

That drew a tight-lipped smile from her. "Just get it out and wrap it, and I'll be fine in a few days."

He doubted the latter, but he didn't comment on it. With a deep breath, he opened her bag. He knew how she sorted her things, and quickly found what he needed.

Carefully holding the ends of the tools into the flames, he tried to calm his racing mind. Sure, he knew what he had to do. However, he also knew all the things that could happen if he slipped up and made a mistake, all too well. As a physician, Nadia needed full use of her right arm. She couldn't afford to lose any dexterity because of some stupid blunder. The thought was enough to make his hands shake, and he turned so that she couldn't see while he focused on stilling them.

It wasn't like she was giving him any choice. At least she knew the risk she was taking… or so he tried to tell himself. The thought brought little relief.

By the time he turned back, she had moved from the stone she had sat on before to the ground and carefully stretched out along it.

"Ready?" he asked her, half-hoping she would say no.

"As ready as I'll ever be." That seemed a lot more ready than he was, as a matter of fact. He took up a position from which he could see what he was doing by the fire-light and still reach the wound.

Sheer willpower kept his hand steady as he moved the tool down, manoeuvring it into the hole the bullet had left in Nadia's flesh.

She hissed through her teeth, and he stopped the motion.

He couldn't do it. He was hurting her more than she already was, and he couldn't do it.

Nadia was of quite a different opinion there. Her voice was a snarl and her eyes shone with irritation. "Get it over with!"

 _Get a grip on yourself_ , Erik scolded himself mentally. The pain of others had never affected him before. This was a very bad time to take up that habit. Confusion clouded his mind. Why this change? Why did he have to start empathising with people now? Why could he almost feel Nadia's pain as if it were his own? And what if he made a mistake? What if his hand shook at just the wrong moment?

"Erik, damn you!" Bordering on furious now, her voice tore him out of his thoughts, and he forced his eyes to focus only on the wound, not the woman. He narrowed down his attention to that one spot of dark red and the task at hand. If he worked quickly and accurately, it'd be over all the sooner.

He managed to wrench the bullet free in the second attempt and dropped it on the ground next to him as he reached for a piece of bandage to wad up and press against the wound, which was bleeding freely again.

Nadia reached out with her left and took it from him. "Leave it for a little while," she said, her voice calmer now but sounding somewhat strained. "Let the blood wash it clean. You can bind it in a few minutes."

It was a good point, and he nodded his agreement, turning to clean the implements he had used and collecting the saddle blankets they slept under when they had to camp out instead. Usually, they would have shared a quick, cold dinner of bread and cheese. Uncertain whether Nadia would even want any food this night, he returned to the packs once more to get the bag that held their supplies just in case.

By the time he returned to the fire, Nadia was sitting up, half-leaning against a large boulder, and pressing a folded bandage against the wound to staunch the flow of blood. She looked pale and exhausted.

"I don't think I can eat now," she said with a wry twitch of the corner of her mouth when she saw what he brought.

He moved into position to help. "Then don't. It can still serve as breakfast." He took the strip of cloth from her unresisting hand, applying steady pressure for a short while before folding up a fresh piece and fastening it in place over the wound with a tight bandage. 

"There." He tied off the ends of the white linen strip and rocked back onto his heels, unsure what to do with his hands now that he was done. He wanted to touch her again, to offer comfort against the pain her eyes betrayed even though she wasn’t complaining.

To keep himself from giving in, he spread out the blankets on a clean patch of ground nearby and motioned towards them. "Try to sleep. I'll keep watch."

She didn't argue.

Erik waited for her to curl up on her side on one of them, keeping her injured shoulder off of the ground, and wrap the rest of the blanket around herself before starting to move away.

Her voice kept him back. "Erik…"

"What?" There was a tremor in his voice, so slight that she probably didn’t notice it. He did, however, and he disliked it. Why was he feeling all apprehensive, as if expecting harsh words from her? He had done nothing wrong.

But he had hurt her.

Because he had had to, he reminded himself. She had asked him to, knowing that the procedure would be painful. And for all that he knew he had not made any mistakes, had not worsened the situation for her.

"Don't go away."

Now, that certainly was unexpected.

"I'm not going away," he replied, pitching his voice to be soothing. "I'm right here, keeping watch to make sure no one disturbs our camp." A fireplace, some heaped packs and a couple of blankets on the ground hardly qualified as a camp, but it wasn't like he had any better word for it.

He thought he saw her shake her head in the shadows.

"No. I need you… close." She sounded more tired than he had ever heard her before, the strain of her injury creeping into her voice now as well. "Please?"

For a moment, he stood frozen where he was. Images of being 'close' to Nadia suddenly sprang up in his mind, and he banished them. She didn't mean that kind of close. Couldn't, wouldn't even if he were a normal man – at least not tonight, with the fresh wound in her shoulder. "How close do you want me?" he asked, the words so low that for a moment he feared she wouldn't hear and he would have to repeat them.

She patted the ground next to her.

Swallowing his fears, he returned to her side and sat on the ground by her side.

His mind was racing, taking turns he did not appreciate. He had to quiet those thoughts somehow. Sitting at the other side of the fire and keeping watch through the night would have been easier, but it wasn't strictly speaking necessary. Their horses were as good as guard dogs. They would alert them to any unbidden visitor, as they had done before.

After another moment's hesitation, he, too, wrapped himself in a blanket and bedded down for the night, forcing himself to relax until he drifted off into sleep.

 

  


  
  
Illustration by Rebekah

 


	27. Chapter 27

At Nadia's insistence, they travelled on the next morning, riding at a slow pace to the next village where Erik insisted on taking a room for a few days at least. In spite of being obviously in pain, she was about to resist, until he pointed out that she was hardly in a condition to help defend them, should they run into another holdup or any other trouble, and that he would be outnumbered too easily.

They travelled on earlier than he would have liked, but, as Nadia made certain he was aware of, later than she did.

Even then they didn't press on at their former speed, instead taking their time as he carefully watched her for signs of fatigue or pain while trying not to let her notice it was what he was doing.

He feared he wasn't all too successful at that.

They arrived at their destination well behind their planned schedule, and set to work immediately.

He settled in the guest room assigned to him by a servant, trying to ignore the whispering she engaged in behind her hand about the masked stranger the Mistress had brought with her while still within earshot of Erik's keen senses

As it turned out, taking care of the business at Nadia's family property was a matter of roughly two weeks' work. By the end of that time, both Nadia and Erik were convinced that neither of them would ever enjoy an accountant's work.

Erik was relieved to see that she did not seem to have suffered any permanent damage from her wound. Every time he had tried to suggest that she actually see another physician about it, she had cut him off curtly, pointing out that since the bone wasn't hurt – or at least not to the point of qualifying as a fracture – the wound would heal just as well on its own if kept clean.

She still favoured the arm, especially when she thought he wasn't looking, but she didn't seem to have lost any dexterity in that hand.

He had half-expected his restlessness to increase now that he was so close to the place where he had grown up, where he might go to inquire where his mother had gone after he had left, so that he could decide whether he wanted to go looking for her or not.

In fact, however, the opposite had been the case. From the moment they had arrived, he had not had the slightest urge to take his horse and ride over to that village to do any research.

Maybe that was because there was French spoken all around him now, and the sheer pleasure of hearing his native language around the clock and everywhere put him at ease. He didn't think it had anything to do with helping Nadia sort out her family's business and the estate's books. After all, he had been quite busy back in Rome as well, working on his plans for the mansion and on putting the improvements he devised into practice.

Now, though, as it became clear that Nadia had no intention of staying for much longer, a new sense of unease invaded his mind.

He would have liked to pack up and go back to Italy with her, to spend the rest of his days in that splendid city, pretending to be just another member of her household, pretending to be a stonemason's son and heir – but he knew that he could not do that.

To run when he was so close to his former home, to leave again without paying it even the shortest visit, would be an act of cowardice.

Erik had called himself many things in the course of his life, but coward had never been one of them. He wasn't going to start now, either.

They were sharing a bottle of wine and companionable silence in the villa's parlour when Nadia broached the subject.

"Did you want to visit your old home before we turn back?"

He started at that, for all that it came close to his own thoughts at the moment – or maybe because of it.

An uneasy shrug accompanied his answer. "I probably should. I don't expect my mother is still living there, but maybe they know where she went." He could hear that he didn't sound eager. In his ears, it seemed more as if he were talking about a pending ordeal that he could not avoid and somehow had to make the best of.

Nadia, practical as always, ignored his tone and focused on the more tangible aspects of the situation "How far is it, exactly?"

"Shouldn't be more than half an hour's ride at most," he replied. Gathering his resolve, he added: "I think I'll just ride over and do it tomorrow, if you don't need me."

She nodded vaguely, taking her time giving him a verbal answer. When it finally came, it was quite different from what he had expected. "Do you want me to come along?"

He hesitated. Did he?

Would not going to face the ghosts of his past alone make it easier for him – or harder? Should he even try to make it easier? What kind of things might Nadia learn about him if she came along? People might still remember him, the monstrous child that was hidden away. Was Father Mansart still alive, the priest who had once declared him possessed by demons, and tried to exorcise him? If so, what if they ran into him?

So many things that he didn't want to be reminded of and that he certainly didn’t want to share with anyone had happened in that village.

And yet, the thought of not having to have those memories alone was appealing.

He opened his mouth to decline her offer anyway, intending to assure her that he would be fine, that all he would be doing was ride into the village and ask for some information.

"I think that…" he broke off, swallowing, and reconsidered at a moment's notice. "That would be very much appreciated."

*

At a leisurely walk, the distance was more than half an hour's ride, but Erik didn't push his horse and Nadia simply rode next to him, not pushing him to greater speed or to conversation.

He had spent most of the morning as they had breakfasted, gotten ready and set out silently berating himself and calling himself all kinds of fool for agreeing to let her come along.

He remembered that time on the first evening of his stay at Nadia's mansion, when she had invited him to dinner unmasked and he had panicked at the mere memory of things that had happened in that village, that house they were now riding to. Of course he had shared that table many times since then, and more times unmasked than masked. Still, that memory was a reminder that things in his past still haunted him, even though he had once though they had been banished to the world of his dreams and would never be allowed out in broad daylight again.

"I think I should warn you," he said as they neared the village. "That place holds few happy memories for me, and many bad. I do not know how many people in that area still remember me, but there will probably be a few, and they will be thinking of me as a monster, a deformed, mad creature that should have been put down instead of being allowed to live."

She nodded several times as he spoke, answering only when it was clear that he had finished for the moment. "So we are likely to run into some idiot or another. We can handle idiots."

"It's not just that," Erik pointed out. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead now, unwilling to look at her and see the reaction on her face. "There was a priest who came to our home regularly. He gave me lessons – things went well with him, or so I thought until one day something happened to make him decide that there must be demons in my head."

Her hands must have been clenching on the reins. In any case, her horse dropped back for a moment and she had to urge it forward again to catch up with him.

Was she angry with him?

He wouldn't have been surprised. He had lost his faith in god a long time ago, and it certainly couldn't have escaped her notice. She didn't seem to feel one way or the other about it, at least not where he could see it. Some Sundays saw her going to church, others did not.

Still, he knew many people believed in things like possession, and who was to say that she, for all her scientific experimenting in the basement, did not? He could hardly fault her for getting angry at not being told that she had been sheltering a man who had once been declared possessed by a priest and, if it had been true, would still be carrying that devil.

"I can't imagine what he did to you." Her voice sounded calm but strangely flat when she spoke, and he knew that tone. That was how she talked when she was trying hard not to let her anger show – anger for the sake of the person she was facing, not at them.

Was she angry for him, then? At whom? Mansart?

He didn't get the opportunity to think about it any further, since they reached the edge of the village.

It had grown since he had left, but not enough to be called a town now.

Still, it took him a moment to get his bearings and find the right street. He hadn't been out in the village much after all, except for the times he had snuck into the church to play the organ and the one time he had run away.

Luckily, no one paid them any attention as they rode silently through the streets, their horses' hooves sounding unusually loud in Erik's ears.

A cold shiver ran down his back when he turned into the street where his mother's old house stood. It hadn't changed much – neither the street nor the house. He pulled up in front of it, sitting in the saddle for another moment while he gathered his courage and self-consciously lifted his hand to make sure his mask was placed properly on his face. He wondered who the people who were living here now were. Had they heard of the freak who had been born here? Were their children, if they had any, telling scary stories about the things that had gone on in this house before their family had moved in to their friends? Would they even know anything about where his mother had gone?

Maybe, if they were still the same people who had bought the place when she had gone off with her lover. How likely was that?

There probably wasn't any point in trying in the first place.

Surely this wasn't the first new owner. Surely they'd know nothing for certain, nothing at all beyond some rumours that might still be going around.

If there was no point in even trying, he might as well turn around and ride back now.

He was just about to suggest that, but Nadia had already dismounted and was waiting for him to do the same.

He could have asked her to remount, but somehow that would have been like admitting defeat in the worst of fashions.

Taking a last, shuddering breath as he steeled himself for what he was going to do, hoping that if they were asked inside the new residents had changed the place beyond recognition, he joined her in the street and loosely looped his mare's reins over the fence before giving his companion a brief nod.

"Let's see if they're home." To his surprise, his voice sounded calm, even though his hand shook as he pushed open the gate and walked to the door to knock in a series of three quick, hopefully confident raps.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	28. Chapter 28

The woman who opened the door was older than he remembered, but there was no way he could have mistaken her for anyone else. He would have stumbled back a step in surprise, if Nadia hadn't stood there.

She had no such benefit, it appeared, and she did take a step backwards as her eyes widened the moment they took in the tall, lean figure with a white mask covering all facial features save two golden eyes that shone in the darkness of their sockets.

"Mademoiselle Perrault," he said, his voice low and still tinged with disbelief. "I didn't know—"

"Erik!" She sounded surprised, as well as shocked, but neither as surprised nor as shocked as he would have expected. There was another note in her voice as well, much harder to place. Was that… relief? "You came! I hoped you would, but I didn't think it was possible. How did you hear?"

Hear what? He wondered. Why would Mademoiselle Perrault – oh no, he corrected himself mentally. She was surely married now, a Madame and with an entirely different name.

"I'm sorry," he quickly assured her. "I didn't – how should I address you now?"

She seemed confused for a moment. He could watch the moment she caught on to his meaning in the movements of her face. "Oh no," she hastened to say, a sound almost like a giggle escaping her lips. "No, Mademoiselle Perrault is quite correct. I never married."

Erik nodded. He made no move forward that might suggest he intended to enter. He didn't really. He had no wish to see the inside of the house he had spent the first years of his life in. What would he do if, against all odds, she invited him in? If Nadia let him, he could probably claim urgent business elsewhere. But how to explain why he had dropped by at all?

He had been prepared to deal with a stranger, inquire about the former owner and inhabitants of this building, and then deal with the next step of his search when the time came – or, if his mind permitted, forget about it entirely.

"Are you living here now, then, Mademoiselle Perrault?"

It may have been a stupid thing to ask, but it was the only thing he could make himself say right away.

"What?" Confusion clouded her features, and she took a moment to shake it off. "Oh no! I'm just staying here to help Madeleine while she is –" She broke off. "You didn't come to see her because you heard, did you?"

"I heard nothing," Erik admitted. "I happened to be in the area and I felt like having a look at the place where I was born. That is all. What do you mean, you came to help Mother? They aren't still living here… are they?"

The one thing that might be worse than finding a familiar face at this doorstep would be to find his Mother's beau, the doctor she had met not too long before he had run away from home, here. The man who had pronounced him insane, who had wanted to commit him to an institution where he would live out his life behind bars. The man who had decided that he wasn't even to be considered human, that he was something _else_ …

No, he didn't think he would be able to face him. If they had stayed here, enjoying their lives in this house once he was gone, he would turn around, get on his mare and race back where they had come from, no matter what Nadia said or how close she stood at his back as if trying to keep him from bolting.

"Won't you come in?" Mademoiselle Perrault asked without answering his question.

Erik shook his head. His feet felt rooted in place, as if he couldn't have moved them to enter if he'd wanted to.

"Madeleine never moved away from here," she told him, not pressing the matter for the moment. "She's in the bedroom."

The bedroom that he had been banned from as a child, that he had been strictly and under threat of punishment forbidden to enter. The only room in the house that held a mirror. The room with the mirror to which he had been dragged that night on his birthday when he had come downstairs without a mask on his face, where she had forced him to look at the monster that was nothing but his own hideous face.

He felt dizzy and reached out for the doorframe to steady himself.

"What about her doctor friend?" he choked out. "Did he move in here?" Are they happy? Did I do that right at least?

"Oh, Erik," the woman exclaimed, emotions crossing her face too fast for him to keep up with them. "No. No, he did not. Madeleine sent him away that night – the night you disappeared? He said things – unforgivable things. She – Madeleine did not want him after that. She wanted to make things up to you, change things between you. Please, Erik, won't you come in? This is not a matter to be discussed in an open doorway and half in the street."

He felt an encouraging hand on his back and half-turned to look at Nadia.

The older woman seemed to notice his companion for the first time then, her eyes darting from Erik's white mask to Nadia's face, framed by hair kept practically short, then down at her less than appropriate attire for a female.

If a hint of disapproval crossed her face at the sight, she hid it quickly.

She's gotten better at this, Erik thought. I would have missed it if I hadn't expected it.

There had been no way to miss her shocked look when she had seen him unmasked that night, though she'd covered it up quickly then, too.

"Both of you," she amended. "Bring your…" She hesitated, uncertain of how to refer to the woman who travelled with a creature like Erik. He knew what must be going on inside her head now: A woman accompanying Erik could not possibly be his wife, or his lover – someone like Erik would never have either. So who was she? "Friend in as well."

Well, that was certainly accurate.

He exchanged a look with Nadia, who met his eyes evenly but did not venture forward or indicate that she would rather stay where they were. The decision, it appeared, was his alone.

Indicating his agreement with a resigned nod, he straightened his back and forced his legs to move. If Madeleine was in the bedroom, she would surely come out.

I should never have come here, he thought as he crossed the threshold, entering the house he had fled so long ago. I should never have returned.

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you go, OpenEyes. I hope you enjoy the update.

_I shouldn't have come,_ Erik repeated for what must have been the hundredth time as he followed the woman inside.

"In the bedroom," she told him once more. "Just go right in, Erik. She will be so happy to see you."

He looked at her with a doubtful expression that must have been visible even with his mask on. "I can't just walk in there," he insisted. "She wouldn't want that. She couldn't—" He broke off, his thoughts once again going back to the time when he had been a young boy, forbidden from ever entering that room – the room with the mirror.

The mirror that seemed to house a monster…

"She'll be so happy to see you," she insisted once again, but she did go ahead of them and open the bedroom door to look inside. "Madeleine," she said, her voice acquiring an artificially cheerful quality that made both Erik and Nadia wince behind her back. "Someone's here to see you."

She motioned for Erik to take her place as she stepped aside.

Wishing she had just said his name and dreading the look on his mother's face when he appeared in the doorway, Erik obeyed.

His mother was lying on the bed, pale and very obviously sick. Still, she paled another fraction and her eyes widened in surprise when she saw the lean, dark figure in the mask appear in the doorframe.

"Erik," she breathed, struggling to sit up and failing as a coughing spell overcame her and she had to focus on breathing.

Erik wasn't quite sure what would be the appropriate response. Had he found one of Nadia's patients in this situation, he probably would have come to her aid without any second thoughts. He certainly would have if it had been Giovanni.

This was his mother, though, and touching her, even only to help her raise herself up straighter so she could breathe more easily, was out of the question. He couldn't inflict his touch on her, knowing how she abhorred it.

Stepping aside to clear the doorway, he cast a glance back over his shoulder. "Nadia," he said, hating the helpless tone in his voice and hoping she wouldn’t argue.

He felt her hand brush his back as she stepped past him, a silent gesture of support and encouragement.

With quick, precise movements born from long practice, she raised the woman on the bed into a half-sitting position until her cough subsided and her body relaxed again.

Erik had seen Nadia take care of patients many times before – often enough to know that something was different here. There was something in the way she moved, every touch perfectly professional but aiming at being efficient, rather than comforting.

Was it possible that she did not like his mother?

Ridiculous. They hadn't even met properly yet!

"Madame," Nadia said as she let the woman sink back into her pillows carefully. "My name is Nadia. Believe it or not, I am a physician. Do you mind if I do a quick examination?"

Madeleine shook her head weakly, while Erik pondered what she had just said. In fact, he had been almost surprised when, upon reaching Nadia's family's estate in Rouen, he had suddenly heard the servants address her by her last name.

Somehow, he hadn't ever considered that she might have one – though that, of course was just as laughable as his earlier thought. Of course she had one. So did he. He merely didn't use his – and neither did she, except within the confines of her family's property, apparently.

Nadia conducted a quick, almost cursory, examination before she moved away from the bed.

For a moment, Erik's eyes met those of his mother. He glanced away as quickly as he could. Even with the mask on his face, he felt uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

"Erik…" Her voice was weak, and he put it down mostly to his superior hearing that he understood her.

"Yes, mother?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the floor, his voice politely distant. Would she tell him to leave now? Get angry because he had come? Remind him what happened before he had left – not that he needed the reminder – or blame him for her doctor leaving?

"Come closer," she said, the words tearing a small cough from her before she added. "Please?"

He had never heard her say "please" to him before. Entirely without his volition, his feet moved, carrying him forward until he was standing next to Nadia, arms crossed protectively in front of his chest, hands clasping his upper arms as if holding onto himself could keep him from slipping into memories.

He kept his head bowed and his eyes fixed on the floor in front of the bed. He couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes, to see whatever reproach or accusation would be evident in them up close.

"Nadia's good at her job," he said, feeling the need to fill the silence. "You're in capable hands with her."

The woman next to him gave a snort. "This is more along your line or work than mine, Erik," she told him in that no-nonsense tone she always used when she thought he was saying something stupid. "She'll benefit more from your herbs than my knife."

Uncertain of how to respond to that, Erik was still contemplating his options when his mother spoke again.

"Erik…" Her voice had a wavering quality to it, breathless as if she wasn't getting enough air into her lungs to use it properly. "Erik, look at me."

As a child, in the last months that he had lived at home, he had been quite capable of refusing his mother's commands. He had actually learned to, even, control her to a degree, with the little inventions of his childish mind, paying her back for keeping him a prisoner in small increments and, though he would have been unable to put it that way at the time, treating him like a monster or a freak.

As an adult, he found it impossible to resist.

Slowly, he raised his eyes from the floor, moving his gaze up the bedframe until it finally rested on his mother's face.

She had aged gracefully, though her recent illness had left its marks on her, giving her the tell-tale appearance of someone who had lost weight recently. Still, her skin – the pallor being too clearly borne of illness to be considered beautiful – had acquired few wrinkles and her hair had hardly changed colour since he had last seen her.

Her lips twitched into what was surely supposed to be a smile, though the expression looked forced – whether due to her pain or because she was thinking of what was hiding behind the white mask he wore, he couldn't tell.

Had he been asked to guess, though, he would have been able to make up his mind which one was more likely quite quickly.

"Erik," she started again. "I… I didn't expect you to come back."

"I'm sorry, Mother," Erik told her. He had wanted to sound sincere, but it came out in a resigned tone. "I shouldn't have come."

"I was … hoping to see you again, at least once, before … you know…"

Before I die, he assumed the words were, though he doubted the content. She had always been happiest when she didn't have to see him.

"I don't think you will die, Mother," he told her. Not if you're willing to take medicine I have mixed, he added mutely. There were no traces of blood when she coughed, which was encouraging.

"That night," she went on, either not hearing or not caring about his words. "That night I told Marie that things would change, that we would collect all your masks and throw them in the fire, and start over. By morning, you were gone, though."

"Mademoiselle Perrault mentioned," Erik said, unsure of what else to answer. It sounded too incredible – so incredible, in fact, that he nearly called her out on the lie right then. Even he didn't know for certain what stopped him. Maybe it was that Nadia's attitude towards the sick and injured was rubbing off on him.

"Will you take off your mask now?"

The words startled him, both in content and tone. She sounded almost hopeful.

Nevertheless, Erik gave a firm shake of his head. "I don't think that's a good idea, Mother," he told her.

Oh, he knew his face was changed, but that couldn't possibly be enough to live up to her aesthetic standards.

Once before, he remembered, she had told him to take off his mask. That had been when the man who had taught him the theory of architecture, mathematics and other things, had first come to their home, proposing to take him home with him as his student, claiming that they were beyond the need of hiding deformity. And still, his face had gone stony at the sight of Erik's face, though he had not betrayed revulsion or horror. Madeleine had stood behind her son that day, taking off his mask when he refused to and putting it back on him.

"It is," she said, her voice sounding a little firmer now. "Erik, I meant it when I swore to myself – and to Marie – that things would change, that I would never require you to wear a mask again. That I would try everything to become the mother you deserved."

She had to pause as a spell of coughing overtook her. Once again, Nadia moved in, helping her sit up to make it easier for her to breathe.

"I would rather leave it on," Erik said when the spell was over and Madeleine was resting comfortably against her pillows again. He tried to change the subject. "I can brew a drought to help with your cough and the fever."

His mother hesitated for a moment. "Thank you," she finally said.

Erik started. That was a first time as well. She had never been in the habit of saying 'please' or 'thank you' when talking to him.

She did not let the matter of the mask rest, though. "Is it because of her?" she wanted to know, indicating Nadia with a weak movement of her head.

The two exchanged a brief look. Nadia had her teeth clamped on her lip to keep from speaking up.

"No," Erik said after another second. "That is no reason. It simply does not feel appropriate to take the mask off … here."

Here. In this room where he had stood unmasked once before. His eyes darted to where the high mirror had once been, the mirror he had broken with his bare hands that day out of fear and horror of the monster that he had seen inside it, that horrible, distorted face… The mirror had never been replaced. His hands, still scarred from that night, clenched as he felt the scene catch up with him.

A steady hand on his arm kept him from losing himself in the memory again.

His eyes focused on Nadia. When had she moved away from the bed to stand beside him?

"Erik?"

Was his mother sounding concerned? That couldn't be… could it?

"Let me show you that I mean it." She sounded almost pleading now.

She wouldn't let it go. Erik knew his mother, and he knew that once she had latched on to an idea, she would not let go of it, no matter what it took. She had beaten his letters into him when writing had come so much harder to him than calculating and drawing and music.

Nadia's hand still rested on his arm, comforting and reassuring.

 _If she looks at me with the same revulsion that I remember_ , Erik told himself, _I will leave this house never to return, and she can die of her illness if she likes._

He let his gaze drop to the floor, staring at the tips of his boots as he lifted his hands to his head slowly to take off his mask.

 

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	30. Chapter 30

It took all the willpower Erik could muster to raise his eyes from the floor again.

Even as it was, he kept his head partially lowered, looking at his mother from under half closed eyelids. He did not want to see her reaction to seeing him unmasked, and yet he needed to know.

He should credit her for making an effort at least, he thought. She didn't avert her eyes, though he could see her face had paled another fraction, and her expression was one of focused neutrality.

What had she been thinking when she had told him to uncover his face? Had she truly believed that her reaction to his sight would have changed all of a sudden?

He didn't doubt that she had told herself that, that she had even talked herself into believing that she would feel differently upon seeing him again. She had always been good at making herself believe in what she wanted to be.

The utter revulsion he had feared to see was, at least, absent.

Knowing how much his face had changed, how much more human than in the past it looked now– even though it still was far from normal - , he wondered how she would have reacted if that had not been the case.

He glanced at Nadia, then back at his mother. Had her expression changed? Had the corners of her mouth moved a fraction in a forced attempt to smile? Was there a minute increase of the level of disgust in her eyes?

Going down that path, he realised, would take him on a road that would never end. The only way to stop himself from getting lost in attempts of reading what might or might not have been there was to remove himself from the situation and forcing his mind to focus on something else.

He was looking for an excuse – any excuse really – to leave the room, to flee from his mother's look that was not quite a stare, and felt a wave of guilty relief when she herself provided him with one by launching into another coughing fit.

"I'll see what I can do with the teas we brought," he muttered as he was already turning away, crossing the rooms with long strides that were almost suggestive of flight, rather than an orderly retreat.

Nadia's touch was firm but impersonal as she helped the sick woman sit up straighter until the spell passed. Her face betrayed nothing, set in a professional expression that gave the onlooker no hint at what was going on beneath.

Madeleine watched her wordlessly even after she had stopped coughing. Only when Nadia moved a little way back from the bed did she speak again, her voice still a little breathless.

"I saw the way you looked at him," she observed.

Nadia raised her eyebrows. She had no intention to answer what clearly did not require a response.

"You love him, don't you?"

The younger woman's mouth twitched as she bit back an answer, shrugged and then gave a half-nod. She wasn't exactly trying to keep it a secret, though she feared Erik would run far and quickly if he ever figured it out.

The more she learned about his past, the less surprised she was about that.

"Treat him better than I did," Madeleine said, her voice only a little above a whisper.

Dropping the professional façade for a moment, Nadia snorted. "That won't be difficult."

*

Erik closed the door behind him and, his eyes fixed firmly on his destination, made for the front door.

He wasn't going to run away, though he wanted nothing more than to get on his mare and race back to Nadia's estates and wait for her to join him so they could set out for Rome. He had no wish at all to remain in Boscherville a moment longer.

Still, his sense of duty would not allow him to do so. He would get the supplies Nadia always had in her saddle bags, which now also included a collection of the herbal remedies he had shared with her, and do what he could.

His mask was crumpled in his hand, and he angrily stuffed it into a pocket. So she wanted him to be unmasked and the world to see her monstrous son? She'd change her mind soon enough, but it might be too late to reconsider then. He wasn't a child anymore, to be told when to don and doff a mask for her benefit.

A small voice in his head reminded him that he was wearing it for his own comfort as well, and he quenched it quickly. It wasn't true – not anymore. He hadn't worn the mask in Rome for weeks, not when working on the house, not when buying or collecting materials, not when visiting Giovanni – his _Father_ by choice, though not by blood.

He let the door fall shut behind him as he returned, and headed to the kitchen. He needed a table to work on, and the living room with its piano where he had spent so many hours playing – possibly the happiest hours he had spent in this house – was not his first choice.

Better the kitchen, with all of its unhappy memories attached. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he knew that he needed to sustain the anger that had started to blossom inside him to keep going. Later, in the solitude of the guest room he lived in in Rouen, he could allow himself the leisure of giving in to whatever other emotions were lurking beneath the surface.

"Erik."

That was Mademoiselle Perrault's voice. The clap of the carelessly shut door must have alerted her that there was something going on.

He turned towards her, realising a fraction too late that she wasn't aware that he was unmasked.

Surprise registered on her face rather than the shock that she had been so fast to cover up behind a forced smile the other time he had unexpectedly entered her presence with his face exposed.

Today, her smile seemed a little more sincere. Maybe she had been practicing.

"You look good!" she told him.

Hadn't she said something along those lines back then as well? How nice you look in your new suit, he thought – that was it, or something very like it.

"Can we do without the lies?" he asked coldly. "I know as well as you do that I never look _good_."

Even as the words left his mouth, he regretted them. Mademoiselle Perrault had never, as far as he could remember, shown him anything but kindness. A few times he had heard her confront Madeleine over the way she was treating him even, his ears straining to make out the conversation in spite of the closed door and stairwell separating them.

He had heard his mother tell her to just take him and raise him instead of her then, if she knew so much better how to do it, and for a fleeting moment, had allowed himself to entertain that idea before forcefully crushing it underfoot.

"I'm sorry," he said, hoping that she did not think it an empty phrase. "I didn't mean to snap at you. I am – It's not an easy place for me to be." He started laying out packages as he spoke. It gave him a place to put his hands as well as his eyes.

Accepting his apology with an inclination of her head, she approached the table.

"What are you going to do?"

"Relieve her cough and bring down her fever," he said. "It would not be right to leave her to the mercy of whatever local physician has been treating her."

  
  
Illustration by Rebekah


	31. Chapter 31

After that visit, Erik started counting the days until they would start on their way back to Rome. He had left his mother with a good helping of an herbal concoction that would likely save her life if she actually decided to use it, but without any intention of ever returning to that house.

 

Both eager to get back, they travelled faster than they had on their way to France, though not fast enough to seem like they were running from something.

 

Their life back home enveloped them only minutes after they arrived. Their bags were still standing in the hallway when a boy came knocking at the door, asking – demanding, almost – that Nadia come and have a look at his sister. It appeared that someone had spotted them riding back into town, and passed on the news lightning-fast.

 

If Erik had ever feared that being away for weeks would make it impossible for him to return to the life at the manor that he had had before they had left, those fears were proven groundless within hours of his arrival. They were up to their elbows in the same work they had done before.

 

He took the time to check on Giovanni, relieved to find the old man still alive, though not as well as he could have been.

 

Relieved also that he saw none of the badly concealed disgust in his face that he had feared – that he had even seen in his dreams in some of the last few nights. He still couldn't quite understand why, but that man truly did not seem to mind his looks.

 

Knowing that did little to soften his mood when, about two weeks after their return, he happened across a book in Nadia's library that he had had no idea existed.

 

It was a rather average book, as her books went, at least by size and appearance.

 

It had a short section of sketches towards the end, which was quite usual for the books Nadia kept on medical subjects as well. It had obviously been read before. There were notes in it in Nadia's handwriting as well as in another script. Pages with notes scribbled down in a hurry were stuck between the pages. He flattened out the folded sheets of paper and read them. The person who had taken the notes had apparently witnessed the procedure and recorded her impressions to add to the contents of the book.

 

The handwriting on the notes was also Nadia's.

 

He was sitting at the small table, alternatingly staring at the book, the notes, and nothing in particular, when she entered that night.

 

It was impossible to miss that something was going on. She hadn't seen him wear that dark an expression in a long time.

 

"What is it?" she asked without any introduction.

 

He tapped the book on the table, then lifted it briefly off of the surface and let it fall back down. "This," he ground out. "You kept this from me."

 

"Don't be ridiculous," she said, uncomprehending. "It's a book. It must have been in the library all along since I haven't added any since you arrived. You've had access to the library almost from the beginning. That's hardly keeping anything from you. Let me see it."

 

Mutely, he held it up for her to read the title.

 

"Ah," she said. "That one."

 

_The Art of Reconstructing the Nose_

 

Published by a German medical man a few decades earlier, it was quite detailed. The author was dead now, but one of his students had given her and her father the opportunity to witness his procedure. "Why would I 'keep it from you'?"

 

"I don't know," he said flatly. "You put your notes in there."

 

She nodded. "I've seen how they do it. We were interested in it because the soldiers we treated – well, at times it would have come in handy. I haven't actually ever done it, though."

 

Looking at the book for another long moment, he eventually turned away and focused on her with all the intensity those golden eyes could convey. He could see her waver under his stare for a moment, though she caught herself so quickly that it would have been lost to him if he hadn't been looking for it. "I want you to do it."

 

"I beg your pardon?"

 

Her voice didn't sound nearly as shaken as he would have expected. His stare must have lost power as his looks had improved.

 

"I want you to do it," he repeated. "On me. It says 'reconstructing', but I skimmed the text. It could as well be 'constructing'. This," his hand tapped the book twice. "Can make me a normal man." That, he had to admit to himself, was not true. Nothing would ever make him a normal man. But with a face more closely approaching normal than his was – even now – he might be able to pretend.

 

Nadia's face had paled a fraction as she held his stare. "I am not," she said slowly, carefully enunciating every word. "Taking a knife to your face, Erik. At least not without good reason."

 

"It is a good reason," Erik said, his voice rising in volume with every word. "I don't need to go on looking like a monster – I don't have to go on looking like this, disgusting everyone who sees me—" he broke off.

 

"Erik, you do not look like a monster," she pointed out. "And who's this everyone supposed to be anyway?" she was speaking louder as well now. "And I meant a good _medical_ reason. I will not cut up your face and risk making a mistake, or slip and—"

 

The angry flare in his eyes interrupted her. "I am willing to risk it," he snapped, rising to his feet in one fluid motion and almost brushing the book off of the table with a sweep of his hand. "Damn you, woman, you would deny me the one chance I may have at being like everyone else? Why do you hate me so?"

 

Flinging the last words at her, he stormed forward, pushing past her and making for the front door.

 

Only when the door fell shut behind him did he realize that he had no idea where he was going.

 

 

 

 


	32. Chapter 32

Eventually, he returned to that corner of the garden where he retired to be alone and think, even though he knew that Nadia knew of it.

He supposed he should have gone back in, apologised to her for running off like that…

But why should he? It was she who denied him an opportunity he had not ever thought possible before. She who wouldn't even listen .

A very small voice in the back of his head chimed in, reminding him that neither had he. She had been right at least in that she hadn't hidden the book from him. It had been right there in the library, probably since long before he had ever entered that house. That it had taken him so long to come across it was not her fault.

The books were sorted roughly by subject – all he would have had to do was go look for it – except that he hadn't known that there was something to look for.

 _She_ had known, though. There had been her notes in that book. She could have told him.

Maybe she hadn't realised she should. It seemed an odd idea to Erik, but so was the idea of someone never showing any reaction to his face to begin with – and that was something she was most certainly guilty of.

He wasn't getting anywhere with his thoughts, circling the same set of circumstances over and over again.

The sounds drifting over from the barn faded as evening came and the man taking care of the horses left. In the ensuing silence, it would have been impossible to miss the sound of footsteps approaching.

Even more impossible to miss who the approaching person was. He knew her steps. He would have been able to pick them out from among a hundred others.

He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, hoping for a little more respite before he had to face her. What was she going to do? He half expected that she would tell him to pack and leave, then surprised himself by realising that the part of him that supported that thought had shrunk considerably. It seemed more of a routine thought, a reaction that came because it ran along a familiar path dug in by many years of habit, than a genuine assumption.

Without saying a word, she settled in the grass next to him. He could hear her arrange herself to get comfortable.

She waited, not saying anything.

He could wait her out – he was certain of that. There was no reason for him to move, or acknowledge her presence in any manner, or even admit to being awake.

Part of him wanted to make her say something first. Would she try to wake him or leave again?

An unexpected reaction followed in the wake of the idea that she might just get up and go back inside without a word.

His eyes flew open.

She was sitting next to him, arranged comfortably in the grass, watching him. She didn't look angry. He wasn't quite sure what she looked like, but angry wasn't it. He knew anger when he saw it.

"I just sent off a letter to my father," she announced without preamble. "I've asked him to come. Knowing him, he will at the earliest convenience. If you want it done after you've gone through everything that can go wrong, he can do it."

He stared mutely up at her for another moment. "He will but you won't?"

A shrug. "He is more objective in this than I am. He'll be less nervous, less afraid to slip. Less afraid to hurt you needlessly. Steadier. It'll be better."

"You're never nervous when you work on people." He pushed himself up on one elbow, half-turning her way.

"I am when it's you."

What was that supposed to mean?

"I couldn't bear it if I made a mistake, Erik," she went on. "Or if I'd disappoint you with the result."

There was more to it, he was sure of that. Still, the words as such made no sense. Why would it matter to her more than usual?

"You sound almost like you like me." The words had left his mouth before he could stop them.

He wanted to close his eyes again, hide from the reaction he would surely see any moment now, shut out the sound of what she was going to say next. How could he have so stupidly put her in a situation in which she could not do anything else but to destroy the dreams he secretly entertained, sometimes – thoughts so frightening to him that he rarely let them out even in the solitude of his room.

Instead of the disgust and rejection he expected, something not unlike surprise registered on his face.

"You, Erik, can be incredibly dense at times," she declared after a few moments of silence. Reaching out with one hand, she brushed a lock of hair that had come loose from its tie out of his face and tucked it behind his ear. He fingers lingered for a moment longer, her thumb stroking once across his cheek.

He felt blood rise into his face as he froze, unable to move away when all he really wanted to was lean into the touch.

"What's there not to like about you?"

That broke there spell, and he snorted in response before indicating his face with one hand. "This, for one?"

"That," she said slowly, "Is not the horrible mess you make it out to be. And even if it was, there's more to you than a face."

"Or the lack thereof?" he asked coldly. "My—" The words he had been about to throw at her stuck in his throat. Her hand was resting against his shoulder now, and he felt as if it was burning him even through the fabric of his shirt.

Eyebrows mutely raised, she waited for him to continue.

He raised his hands in turn, holding them up for her to see, turning them to make the scars stand out best. "You know how I got those?"

She couldn't of course, and if she somehow did, she didn't get a chance to tell him so. He continued without waiting for an answer. "I broke a mirror. The first mirror I ever looked into. They told me it was my birthday. I was supposed to make a wish. I didn't know yet that some things just weren't for me. She showed me the mirror that day."

That much was true, though the mirror had come later when, hurt, confused and angry, he had come downstairs again without a mask on.

"What did you wish for?" Her voice was low and calm, but he thought he could see anger in a slight change of her posture, a minute twitch of her hand – the same anger she always showed when he told her anything about his mother – that had been barely concealed all the time they had been in her house.

He wasn't sure if there was any sound at all when he spoke, or if he was only mutely moving his lips. His blood was pounding too loudly in his ears. He couldn't not answer, though, even knowing that he was going to destroy any hope he may have had at ever turning those forbidden dreams into something more tangible. The wish had been too outrageous – he knew that now. He had known it since that night before the mirror. "A kiss."

She moved then, and as her hand disconnected from him, he was certain she would turn away and leave. Maybe she would still let him stay, if he promised to behave. Maybe she'd send him away—

The hand came back, not withdrawn but merely adjusted. Nadia leaned forward, her lips brushing his forehead before he even realised what was happening.

"A kiss," she said as she moved back, her face unreadable. "I'm not your mother, though."

There was a strange quality to her voice. He was about to snarl a reply, tell her that he knew, that he wasn't mistaking her for anything she was not.

Any such plans were cut short when she closed the distance between them again. It was the barest hint of a touch at first, her lips against his. Surprise and an utter lack of comprehension of what was happening now kept him locked in place.

Another touch, like the first but more insistent now, as if she had previously only wanted to make sure he wouldn't bolt.

The few times he had allowed himself to dream up a situation like this, he had managed to convince himself that even the impossible was to happen, he would ruin it all because he had no idea of what to do.

Now, he found that his body reacted almost without his help. He was so focused on the new sensations that he hardly had a thought to spare to keep his hands from wandering where they would.

Only when confusion about this latest turn of events finally took over and displaced all else for the moment , and he broke their contact, did he realise what he was doing: One hand buried in her hair as hers now was in his, and the other—

He snatched it back from where it had rested on Nadia's shirt just over her breast.

"Erik?" she asked, sounding a little breathless and a little uncertain.

Should he apologise now? A stubborn little voice in his head refused. She had started it all after all.

"I… shouldn't," he ground out eventually. "I'm not like other men. I have no right—"

"I don't care about any other men." Her eyes caught his and held them. There was no lie in them. He didn't understand, but he was also distracted by the feeling of loss that had come in the wake of increasing the distance between them.

She caught his hand in hers. "Erik, tell me that you don't want _me_ , and I will go back inside and never talk of this again. Otherwise, we don't have to stop here."

He must have fallen asleep and be caught in a dream now. It was the only explanation that made sense to him at that moment. Nadia could not possibly mean what he had just heard her say.

Any number of thoughts flew through his mind, gone again too fast to be put into words. Realising that his other hand was still where it had gone during their kiss, he unwound his fingers from her hair and brought his hand around to brush a stray strand. She moved into his touch, prolonging it.

He didn't even think of objecting when she guided his other hand back where it had come from. Hers remained on top of it for a moment longer.

"Someone might come and see us." It was the first thought that lingered for long enough to do anything with.

Nadia shook her head. "We're in an enclosed garden and all our servants and helpers have gone home for the day. No one's staying the night."

That wasn't in itself strange, but it seemed early to him. He frowned, thankful for something to puzzle out that would distract his mind from the increasing urge to move his hand just enough to reach the lacing of Nadia's shirt. "Why?"

"Because I told them to."

She wasn't laughing at him. In fact, she wasn't laughing at all. Her gaze had remained glued to his face since their kiss had ended, and the expression on her face was nothing he had ever seen directed at him by a woman before.

He wanted to ask her why, but he had the sneaking suspicion that that would fall into the category of being incredibly dense as well.

Could she mean it? He raised his free hand to push back a strand of hair that suddenly felt disturbing on his face. As the lacings trailing from his cuff brushed Nadia's hand, she snatched an end in her fingers, letting his continued movement pull open the bow.

Interrupting his movement, he closed his fingers around her wrist. He did so lightly, taking care not to hurt her. "Where are we going with this?" he asked. His voice sounded shaky. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer. If any other man had been in his place, he would have known where this was leading to – as things were, the only thing he knew for certain was that he couldn't allow himself to believe it was even real.

Nadia made no attempt to pull away. "Wherever you want," she told him. "Erik, if I hadn't thought any such suggestion would drive you from the house in a panic, I would have invited you to my room instead of watching you go back up to yours after dinner a long time ago."

He released her, letting his hand hover as he closed his eyes for a moment. He didn't understand what was going on, but a little voice in his head was starting to suggest that maybe he didn't need to.

There were options. He could have gotten up and walked away, packed his things and left. Giovanni would surely have had a room for him.

There were many things he didn't know at this moment, but he did know that he couldn't leave now and continue to stay in that first floor room that had been his home for the last months. He wouldn't be able to live with a constant reminder of what had been offered to him only to be declined. Maybe if he took what he was given, he would still leave afterwards. It would probably be for the best.

For both of them.

For now, though, he closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.

"I don't know how."

If she laughed at him now, he wasn't sure what he was going to do.

He never found out, because she didn't.

"With your permission, I'll show you."


	33. Chapter 33

Erik experienced a moment of confusion upon waking.

This wasn't his bed. It wasn't even his room. The windows were larger, the angle of the sunlight falling in was wrong. The bed was—

Memory rushed back at him, flooding him with a force that almost made him gasp.

He sat up, suddenly not sure if he wasn't dreaming all of this, the last night, this morning – would he wake up and find it all gone?

Nadia certainly was.

She, however, reappeared before he could go further down that path in his thoughts, coming in through the door that connected the bedroom to the master bathroom.  She was already fully dressed and ready to start her day. Her hair was still damp, but that would hardly last for long in the heat of the Italian summer.

"Good morning!" she greeted him brightly as she sat down on the edge of the bed to lean in.

  
He barely hesitated to return the kiss, though it was still hard to believe that he was finding himself in this situation.

"There's space in the wardrobe," she said, apparently out of nowhere, when they broke apart. Then, noticing his confusion, added: "If you want to move your things down here."

Oh. He wasn't sure if he did. He still wasn't quite done processing what had happened that last night. Several times.

His thoughts must have been plain on his face.  "No need to rush," she assured him quickly. "I need to get to work. I'll see you in a bit."

With that she was gone, leaving him to climb out of bed and start picking up his clothes. How had he managed to scatter them through the room like that?

*

It was easier than he thought to settle into their new arrangement. In fact, they slid right into it, just as if they had previously been living some awkward dance in which they had distorted themselves avoiding to step in certain places, and were now for the first time in a long time able to move freely.

He was almost disappointed that everyone who was attached to the household took the development in stride. For some reason, he appeared to be the only one surprised by how things had gone.

He hadn't forgotten what had led up to this, though, and every unknown caller at the door sent a jerk of anticipation through him.

The expected visitors finally arrived while he was out running errands.

Voices coming from the library, speaking French, tipped him off as soon as he walked down the hallway.

Suddenly nervous, he hesitated. Should he go and join them? Surely they would call for him if they wanted him there. But they had no reason to assume he was back already.

Finally, feeling utterly foolish, he gave the door a quick rap with his knuckles before opening it and sticking his head inside.

The two men who shared their library table turned towards him. There was no mistaken them for anything other than what they were. Their hair was the same auburn as Nadia's, the older man's cropped short, with barely a hint of grey at the temples so far, the younger one's pulled into a simple ponytail. Their features clearly showed the family resemblance. Both still wore travelling outfits, their clothes serviceable in their cut but made of the best-quality leather and fine linen.

"So you are Erik," the older man observed.

Erik gave a half-shrug. "How did you guess?" he asked before he could stop himself, though his hand had already risen to self-consciously cover the nose he did not have.

He almost expected a rebuke from Nadia, but she seemed to be hiding a smirk instead. He couldn't help but return it.

The man had risen and came walking over to the door now, one hand held out towards him. "It's nice to meet you in person after reading all about you in my daughter's letters," he declared.

There was no lie in his eyes, surprisingly. Maybe he was not aware of their change in relationship just yet. Nadia surely wouldn't have written to her father about that … would she? If she had, weren't fathers supposed to be less than pleased if a man shared their daughter's bed without taking her to the altar first?

"Call me Jean," he went on, and Erik found himself taking the hand offered to him as if in reflex.

A moment later, he was caught in a brief embrace of the kind he had seen pass as a greeting among some of his countrymen. He had never been in the awkward situation of having it imposed on him before, though.

Not quite sure about how to react, he froze.

Jean took a step back, his eyes twinkling with amusement. "What did you tell your young man about me, Nadia?" he asked with what could only be mock-reproach. "He seems downright petrified of me."


End file.
